NOON

Nothing remains.                                                                In the end, nothing matters.

The lilting sound of a whistle emerges in the distance again – the rise and fall of breath through someone’s lips – but this time Ira pays no heed.

Her father died in his sleep last night; he didn’t move when she went to wake him up this morning. Still, wrinkled palms on his chest, face tilted towards the wall, a small smile beneath his thick white beard. Appa, she whispered, stifling a cry. She sat looking at his face for several minutes before getting up and taking a bath, making an elaborate breakfast but

unable to eat a morsel, throwing it all away, then falling asleep quietly on her father’s old bamboo chair near the living room window.

His dull grey shawl is still hanging on its armrest.

This was supposed to have been their last day for the summer in her great

grandfather’s little shack – their ‘Mountain Home’ as she has always called it – sitting snug among the dense trees on the Sahyadri slope. Her father was adamantly refusing to leave with her to the United States, he had kept up his fight until his final hours.

Now, she will be the last one in her family to live in the Mountain Home, and the first one perhaps to never return to it.

She is left all alone to do the leaving.

It is either the low buzz of a bee or the rustle of leaves caught in a sudden breeze that stirs her back to consciousness. She feels the solidity of the bamboo chair she is sitting upon and her own weight, the delineation of her fingers on its arms, the folds of the shawl. Slow,

supple. A pause. A couple of deep inhalations and her body returns to its normal pulsation. There is no smell of camphor in the house from her father’s morning devotional rituals. She thinks of him lying motionless in the adjoining room. A sudden warmth shoots through her nerves.

The bee has flown in through the half open window and is anxiously thrumming its russet-ochre body against the wall next to it. The restless movements continue for a couple of minutes until it reaches the opening, flickers its wings, and swirls in an upward circle towards the sky.

The air is empty of bird song; hours have passed. It is almost noon when the low whistling suddenly emerges again. Ira immediately straightens up.

Leaning over the windowsill, she cranes out into the light. Through the foliage of the downward slope and the vast arecanut plantation at the foothills, she can see the sparse silhouette of her ancestral village; a village that has thinned with time, the outlines of the leftover mud houses and red bricked roofs overlooking acres of paddy fields before the earth undulates into waves of blue-green hills.

The view is blanketed in sunlight and the sound of the whistle. It is a familiar whistle; she has heard it often over the years. But she has seen no one, nothing has ever explained where it could have come from.

1987, BROOKLYN

The television is abuzz with new interviews and news – Margaret Thatcher has been elected as the Prime Minister of Britain for the third time a few months ago.

Ira’s heart swells with joy; people with purpose make her smile, women with purpose make her smile. She will visit England sometime, she decides, pulling the grey shawl tight around her arms. Perhaps go and see Paris too.

As she gets up to make tea, she hears the old woman in the neighbouring flat laughing with someone. She must be showing off the new camera her son has gifted her, Ira thinks.

Although the woman is a constant chatter, she is jolly company with her high bun of greyed hair and unhindered laughter. She makes jars of gooseberry pickle for everyone in the apartment block as if she is distributing her memories; even the Americans on the first floor have come to love it. She says she is also from South India but hasn’t travelled much around the Malnad region except to visit the temples. Ira has told her of her village from where her grandfather migrated to the city decades ago, much to the chagrin of her great grandfather. It was an expected yet painful severance of inheritance – not the mere inheritance of the land or the little Mountain Home she still owned – but the abrupt loss of something deeper, something sharper that is felt quite starkly two generations later.

She decides on an Earl Grey tea and watches the steam cloud in front of her like a fleeting constellation as the kettle boils. She whistles a low tune – she doesn’t know if it is a particular song, and she doesn’t really care.

Yes, she would travel to England. And France and wherever else she could.

There is travel in your future – was what Marilynne has also predicted, anyway.

NOON

The earth is warm beneath Ira’s bare feet as she trudges down the steps from the Mountain Home into the yawning wilderness. The afternoon hour is flooded in severe white light. Trees sweaty and spent, crickets punctuating the air, and the emerging gurgle of water.

The stream meanders East softening the stones in its path, then curves sharply and tapers down south, disappearing between the thick shrubs.

Ira walks to the point where it curves, so the stream looks like a loose triangle of water in front of her. The heat of the day seeps into her, she sinks into the ground.

Come closer, the stream beckons. She has named him – she knows it is a ‘him’, because he himself has told her so many years ago when she first encountered him as a child – Amar. She can’t remember a time he has ever run completely dry. A few summers back he had thinned down in the heat; she was then at the tumultuous edge of adulthood, half of her wanting to jump in headlong and half of her painfully nostalgic for what she was leaving behind.

She first came to the Mountain Home (she didn’t feel the need for a more personal name; ‘Mountain Home’ suited it well) as a small child with her amma and appa – the three of them forming a precious wholeness, a completeness – spending the first of a series of never-ending summers in her great grandfather’s shack which her appa had patiently converted and refurbished into a more spacious, liveable home for them. Sometimes her

cousins (few and distant) would also come to stay. Her memories of them have faded over the decades, as have their physical presence.

But now it is just her, a disjointed limb, cut off from an already disappearing bloodline.

1987, BROOKLYN

Last week, Ira came across a new lush red caravan parked between overgrown shrubs somewhere along the East River; gold lettering announcing that the woman inside read fortunes through Tarot. Curious, Ira stepped into a room of dim lights and incense smoke.

She’d never believed that futures could be predicted, for what then would be the point of all the thinking that one does? But the calm in the space made her stay and have her fortune read.

The woman’s eyes were dark and vivid.

‘Marilynne.’ She nodded and smiled.

‘Oh… I …I am Ira.’

A soft violin music was playing somewhere in the background, and Ira felt as if she could happily, comfortably fall asleep sitting opposite Marilynne who was intent and invested on shuffling the deck and pulling out cards for her.

She put out a 7-card spread, gazed at Ira for a minute before continuing.

‘You feel empty, but you don’t really want to do anything about it. You are probably thinking it is happiness, but it is not.’

Ira blinked, palms stiff and intertwined on her lap.

‘Suppressing grief is not the path to happiness.’ Marilynne elaborated. She then explained what the other cards meant.

The Ten of Swords.

The Death card.

The softness of the room, the candles and lamps powdering the corners with light, the various crystals on dedicated shelves.

The Eight of Cups.

‘You have your heart guarded, but spirit is saying you can trust again. You have nothing more to lose.’

Ira squirmed.

Marilynne noticed her fidgeting and smiled tenderly.

‘Something has ended, but you are refusing to see that it has ended. You are a cat which is drinking milk with its eyes closed, thinking that no one can see it. You can’t live life with your eyes closed.’

NOON

The warmth of the noon expands the throbbing cleft in Ira’s head. She does not want to think of her father’s cremation.

But Bhadra mama will soon need to be informed. One of her father’s oldest friends, he lives with his family in the village below and has been a constant presence in their lives.

She will tell him later when he comes by for his daily banter, she decides, and slumps into a quiet sob. He will help her with whatever is necessary.

In the paddy fields below, the farmers and their wives are transplanting the stalks of rice, singing gratefully to the earth for her bounty. She can hear the fragmented strains of their voices.

She sits in the shade of a large tree she has named Sarayu and feels time gently kneading through her as it thaws into dreary, feverish minutes.

Eventually, the slow hours will pass, and it will be twilight. Then dusk, then night and the world will sleep.

Nothing will remain, no gratitude will matter to a sleeping world.

1987, BROOKLYN

Ira has several mixtapes. Favourite songs of her amma and appa, of herself, a mixtape given by a school friend years ago. One contains all the lullabies amma and appa used to sing for her. There are also a few cassettes that are labelled ‘Ira, age 2’, Ira age 3’, and so on.

They hold the precious events her parents recorded – of Ira speaking her first broken sentences, her first time singing on the school stage, her first attempts to mimic a movie

heroine. She can hear her parents’ voices too, chuckling with her and answering her by putting on baby voices, distracting her cries with dolls, showing her the brown cat sitting at their window.

From age 6 onwards, the cassettes become fewer, and echo only her father’s voice.

Some nights she plays them one by one, allows them to lull her for a brief while into the invisible arms of her dead family. The voices feel closer on colder nights; they make her first winter alone in New York slightly warmer. Whenever she listens to them, which is quite often, she imagines the light on the edges of the mountains from her childhood summers all around her. She feels, though briefly, not like a chopped off branch but like the small limb of undivided roots.

‘Nothing more to lose,’ she whispers to herself and smiles.

NOON

Ira is annoyed with time; it comes circling back as the moon and as the sun,

seemingly shorn of a worthy cause. There’s only the weight, the weakness, the tuneless ramble of human thoughts. Being amidst the elements – feet cooling in the stream, face turned up towards the sky and waiting for the low whistle to emerge from within the greens – is a

balm to Ira’s mind. She feels like she owns them all – the mountains, the trees, the birds, the water, the quiet.

She will henceforth only succumb to beautiful hyperboles of this kind, she decides; nothing else is worth the strain. She imagines a different childhood that could have been hers and lived here on the slopes, had her grandfather not migrated – swinging down tree branches with the other children in the village, plunging into the rivers and hiking all day, helping on the fields, waking up to the monsoon rains pattering down the windows, listening to tales told by the elderly women content in their kitchens and lavishing love on everyone, eating poppy seed pudding and coconut dumplings every other day, lighting oil lamps all around the house at dusk, the fragrance of tulsi and incense distilled into the hours. In this childhood, the joy she felt during the summer months’ visits would have been her joy to have for the whole

year, replacing the dusty city streets, the empty bungalow, and the school she had never quite enjoyed. But her grandfather had made a choice for himself to leave all this behind, and inadvertently made the choice for her father’s life, her life and childhood as well. Her destiny was decided generations before she was born. By the time she realised, it had been too late to change anything.

Thoughts curl one after the other, like leaves folding and falling gentle. A murky sorrow has settled over the earth, it would be impossible to try and wrench herself away from its weight. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to come here anymore. She doesn’t want to sit under the sunlight anymore. The thought of her father’s body collapsing into flames on a funeral pyre is a sadness she cannot live through.

In the distance, she can see the hunched form of Bhadra mama slowly making his way up the slope, his dark blanket sheathed over his back and a long bamboo branch supporting him like a cane.

1987, BROOKLYN

The Wollman rink had reopened the previous year and is teeming with people braving the cold and the long distances from their homes. It is the heart of autumn; the world is vapored in dull gold and there have been the first tiny showers of snow.

After her ritualistic visit to Marilynne, Ira takes the subway to Central Park, blissful amidst the crowds, her gloved hands brushing the droplets of dew on the railings of staircases and on the leaves. She breathes in all the laughter around her, the sparkle of city lights, the sounds of people skating on the rink. Christmas trees have sprung up everywhere and make the paths look festive. She stares at the tiny glittering lights that look like baby stars. She sits on cold benches and chugs down bourbons and brandy-soaked fruitcake.

She thrills in cushioning herself in these new sounds of joy, of unfettered human happiness. Everyone here seems to belong completely to the snow.

One can perhaps be a part of joy without feeling joy oneself, she muses.

By the time she returns to her flat, it is past midnight and snowing heavily. She feels heady with the sounds of the evening. She takes out a camphor from her father’s box which she has brought with her from the Mountain Home and lights it up, allowing the familiar smell to engulf her flat for the first time.

There are leftover rice dumplings from breakfast which she heats up with the tiniest bit of gooseberry pickle – just enough for another quick nostalgia for her old home – and eats watching the snowfall from the window. She has never seen snow and she does not want to miss a single moment of it.

On the table next to her plate is the Empress Tarot card, the one Marilynne gave her on her previous visit.

NOON

Bhadra mama is weeping, incessantly calling her father’s name and holding his hands and fingers. Ira is in the living room, not wanting to interfere in their final moments of friendship. She watches the freckles of light and shadow on the walls, remembers sitting on Bhadra mama’s shoulders as a child, his own sons pooling around her ankles and laughing.

The mountains saw her grow, the mountains nourished her. Yet now, as she glances out the window, they seem aloof, as if taking their own time to grieve her father.

She thinks of the numerous tales she has heard from her parents and from the women in the village.

Her great grandfather would apparently sing from this very Mountain Home at night with a voice so resonant that it could awaken all the slopes and all the Gods of the Sahyadris.

‘He could cure diseased crops with his singing.’ Rukmini, Bhadra mama’s wife would gush.

‘He could make the entire village shake.’ Kamala would smile every time she recounted it, half in disbelief herself. ‘Apparently, he never sang in front of anyone, he only whistled while working in the fields or romping around his shack. We don’t forget our people, no matter how long ago they lived. It is their blood that runs in us even now, right?’

‘So how did anyone know it was he who sang, if he never sang in front of anyone?’ Ira asked her once.

‘Oh puttii! Why do you make us laugh! Of course, everyone knew. Everyone in our village knew and cared for everything and everyone else.’

1987, BROOKLYN

Ira has never wanted children. Unnecessary noise, she reckons. People assume she has some problem, poor thing, and is giving excuses. Over the years, she has gleefully watched the prospective men trickle away. If she has failed to find a semblance of meaning beyond

her beloved mountains, she surely won’t find it in another mortal being. As she had reached her forties, people had finally stopped asking.

With her family’s inheritance, she has a comfortable life even without having a job. She had worked for a few years as an assistant to one of her professors, eventually giving it up to take care of her father. Now, her days consist of gorgeous food, walking along the East River, making travel plans. But on sleepless nights, she rages with the sharp ache of memories and questions for which there seems to be no end.

All she yearns for is an escape and doesn’t know how to seek it, so she leans on Marilynne for the strange solace she has begun to provide. Marilynne has become an addiction. It is like standing naked in front of a mirror and liking what you see.

‘Why don’t you predict the future?’ Ira asks one day.

‘Why would I?’

‘Because people want to know?’

‘No. They are usually only looking for reassurance. Or worse, validation.’ ‘Is that wrong?’

‘There is no wrong in this world or in this life, child. But I don’t want to take away people’s inherent power by telling them what’s going to happen.’

‘So, you don’t tell them they will get what they want?’

Marilynne laughs. Better still, I give them a guarantee.’

‘Guarantee! How so? You don’t even say what’s going to happen!’

‘Well, I tell them what has already happened, and that makes them trust my intuition.

And then I give them some insights, some advice. Though the cards do tell me what has the highest probability of occurring, I don’t want them to start depending on it without putting the effort to change the outcomes if they want to.’

‘How?’

‘That’s the magic we humans possess.’

‘Can you tell me what’s going to happen to me? I mean, the highest probability of happening?’

Marilynne smiles, ponders. ‘Everything is connected. Do you know the magic you possess?’

‘Tell me, will I ever be able to return home?’ ‘Home? Which home?’

NOON

Nothing matters. In the end, nothing remains.

Ira knows that she carries the last vestiges of her heritage and fears it will die with her. She hasn’t passed on the lullabies she has grown up with to anyone. Or the songs the villagers sing in the fields, the folklores, the stories of the mountains, the memories of the monsoon rains, the voices of her family.

She has left her own little imprints in the village – helping the farmers in the paddy fields, sitting with the women listening to their stories of woe about their careless husbands or impish boys. Each year she invites all the children of the village for a sumptuous meal at the Mountain Home, and they all in turn bring food for her – rasam, jackfruit fritters, coconut flatbread, jars of gooseberry pickles.

The regret of not having funded the education of girls from her village or sponsoring anyone to visit New York is beginning to grate on her. She has tenderly looked after the ancestral house with her father, though, she consoles herself.

But who would live here? She worries. What would happen after Bhadra mama? Who would come to visit and grow with the trees and gush with the stream?

Bhadra mama has come to sit with her in the living room now. His eyes are weak, his breathing forlorn. All arrangements will be figured out – he will head back down to the village to inform everyone and help organize the funeral and everything else necessary. He and his sons will help her with the ticket back to the city a week or so later as she could no longer leave the next day as originally planned. He will take care of the Mountain Home for her while she is in the city, he has promised. She can return whenever she wants.

Ira doesn’t tell him that she probably won’t be returning. With her father gone, she will either sell or lease their bungalow in the city and move permanently to the States. A third cousin on her mother’s side has settled there and has offered to help her if she goes.

Her family’s inheritance is enough to get her to New York and back whenever she wants, and between the Mountain Home and the money from selling the bungalow, she would have no dearth of resources.

Bhadra mama helps himself up and nods at her. Ira thinks of Rukmini and Kamala and all the others who would soon be making their way up to her on hearing the news, but she doesn’t want to see their kind faces now. She doesn’t want to see anyone anymore; she wants it all to disappear immediately.

As Ira hugs him, she is pained at how frail he feels. The same shoulders that had once carried her now slouch low. She has not been unconscious of the changes over the years; yet the gravity of the situation makes the change feel somehow sudden. As if she has missed the passage of time, and decades have come crumbling into a single moment of ache. The tears are hot against her cheeks as she smiles and tells him that the village women can use the Mountain Home for something or he himself could live in it with his family, there was no point in it being left empty. The walls have stopped speaking to her, anyway. They have gone mute like her amma and appa.

She watches his silhouette wade down the slope through the loss in the air, darker and slower against the arriving dusk.

There are no voices left for her to return to.

1987, BROOKLYN

Ira often imagines the flames of her father’s funeral pyre licking the air and the downpour that had occurred soon after – Bhadra mama has told her every detail of the cremation ceremony. In moments of unbearable loneliness, this is the only thing she can think of. The fire, the burning, the ash. Sometimes, the grey empty sky of Brooklyn without the mountains across the horizon feels like the scattered remains of her father.

When she tells Marilynne of this, she is astounded by her silence.

‘What should I do?’ She repeats again in desperation.

‘Feel it even more.’ Marilynne says. ‘Feel the pain so much that you cannot possibly feel it anymore. Let it flow through you like your blood. Feel it fully and go to sleep. When you wake up, you will feel better.’

On New Year’s Eve, when the world is heralding the future months, Ira burrows deeper into her bed, soaking the darkness that continues to stick and burn into her, her cassettes playing endless into the hours.

The first morning of the New Year is somewhat bright. The woman in her neighbouring flat comes by to wish Ira and asks her to breakfast. Her son and his newly wedded wife are visiting; they form such a happy little bubble. She watches them laughing contentedly over steaming plates of lemon rice and other leftovers from the previous night. A gaping hollowness is swarming within her. Ira is starkly aware of the empty spaces in her own life. She decides to try and fill them up again, even if only with a better kind of emptiness; one that does not scoff at her bitterly.

Back home after breakfast, she lights a candle and holds a corner of the Empress Tarot card to it. The card catches fire in an instant, and she watches the flame lick its way through the image of the empress in a white gown seated on a throne in a forest.

She does not need hollow reassurances anymore; she tells herself resolutely, straightening her shoulders. THIS is her home. THIS is her destiny. She will join a book club. She will make friends. She will invite them for lunches and cook jackfruit fritters. She will sing all her lullabies to their sons and daughters.

The next couple of days are a string of unexplained agony, like a solid mass beneath her feet has shaken. She decides she does not need the reminders of her past anymore; what exactly is she gaining out of repeated listening to dead voices? One early evening she gets all

the cassettes into a carton. She has spotted a charity shop a few streets down and intends to give them all away. Perhaps they could be reused for a worthier purpose than making her cry.

The sudden rain doesn’t deter her. Rains in New York are not like the Malnad monsoons. Here, they seem like an obligation of nature, an event to be checked off the list. In the mountains, they pour in celebration, a long song to soothe the dry spells.

She walks to the charity shop and hands the carton to the man behind the counter. He looks at the labels and gives her a questioning look.

‘Are you sure?’

She nods vehemently.

Ira steps out and rushes towards the East River, towards the red caravan. The rain has hardened. She allows it to soak her, but it somehow doesn’t seem to reach her skin. She has given away the cassettes but the heaviness inside her seems to have increased. She can feel the ground but can no longer feel the voice of rain.

NOON

After Bhadra mama leaves, Ira locks the door and lies down in her room with the window open, looking at the generous sky.

In the end, nothing matters.

Everything will be destroyed. This village, this mountain, this body, this song.

All that is insubstantial will be culled by time; and many other things would be left behind. Her grief is too raw for her to accept this inevitability. She laments her amma, a hazy memory; and her appa, a fearfully tangible absence. She cannot understand which sadness hurts more.

People will come and knock and tired of waiting they will eventually leave, she thinks, trying to summon a dreamless sleep. She stares at the ceiling and decides that it would

be best if she did not return. She has taken care of the Mountain Home all these years, but now she must take care of herself too.

The last flames of twilight light up the sky before utter darkness sets in.

No, I cannot spend any more nights here, she sobs decisively; and there is no need to tell anyone of the decision. Perhaps the earth of a new country will help in forgetting. Perhaps a borrowed home will be a consolation.

She would write letters to Bhadra mama and the others, of course. She would send them money whenever necessary. Whatever happens later would be dealt with later, now she must save herself from ruin.

There is a sudden rustle outside. Ira jolts up.

Gradually, the low whistling emerges again, first soft, then loud, until it is almost deafening, as if the whistler is standing next to her window. She peers out. Glow worms light up the foliage and she can hear the waters of the stream as well, as if calling her. The world seems to tilt under the glimmer of stars on the red sky.

Ira sobs and then laughs out aloud.

The mountains are all burning away for the last time with her into the night.

1987, BROOKLYN

The East River has swelled in high tide. Ira waits as Marilynne looks at her in surprise through the front window before opening the door. She helps Ira dry. There is no violin music playing and no incense lit yet.

‘I was sleeping child. But its ok. You seem like you need to be here now.’

Ira says nothing. Marilynne pulls out the chairs in front of the reading table and shuffles a deck. The first card is the Six of Pentacles.

‘You are never always the giver or the receiver. Life balances it all out.’

‘It doesn’t seem like it.’ Ira sobs. She is surprised to hear herself; it is the first time she has allowed herself to cry aloud since moving to the States.

Marilynne pulls another card. Temperance.

‘You have been patient, but you need to be a bit more patient. It is all divine timing.’ ‘How!!?’ Ira almost screams. ‘What divine timing?? I have no one, and I don’t know

if I want to return home. It is impossible to live there without the people I love. And I don’t know what I am doing here. I have no past and no future. But … but I also don’t feel sad

about it. I have lost everyone … I am unable to understand anything anymore!’

‘That’s completely ok, child. Let’s see what your guides have to say.’ Marilynne gently pats the back of her palm.

‘Everything is a blank.’ ‘Ira…’

‘No! I… I am sorry, I appreciate all that I have gained from you, but I don’t want to come here anymore.’

‘That’s ok. So, you came here just to tell me that?’

‘I… I don’t want false hopes. I have been leaning on you and your readings to make sense of my own mind. And I am afraid I am losing my ability to think.’

‘No. You are afraid because you are knowing yourself too closely for comfort.’ ‘Marilynne, thank you again for everything. I am going to leave. I am going home.’

Ira sighs.

‘Home? Which home?’

Ira gazes at Marilynne’s smile. No, she is not trying to be mean. Blinking back her tears, Ira stands up and hastens to the door. She waits until the door is locked behind her and

leans against the red wall of the caravan. The rain is now a drizzle. A faint streak of gold is appearing on the distant sky, lighting up the trail of grass in front of her in the new light.

Inside, she can hear Marilynne getting her space ready for the evening readings.

Matches striking, feet shuffling, crystals being cleansed.

She hears Marilynne whistle, a hauntingly familiar tune. One that she has heard all her life. A sudden warmth shoots up through her body like lightening. And then she hears the small click of the tape recorder. The unmistakable sound of her amma and appa’s voices singing her favourite lullabies and giggling with her echoes from inside and right through the red walls – dissolving into the chilly air, into the new light on the grass, the sky, the waters of the river and into Ira.