By Ranjani Sivakumar
The heat arrived before Anita did.
She felt it the moment the cab turned off the main road into the lane: a wall of still, wet air pressing against the windows as the trees closed over them. Mango, cashew, jackfruit, coconut, they leaned in from both sides until the lane felt less like a road and more like something the forest was allowing. The air had the particular weight of late May in coastal Goa, not just hot but charged, the way the sky gets when it has been promising something for weeks and has not yet delivered. Palolem was only a kilometre away, but this dead end belonged to a different world entirely.
The homestay was an old Portuguese-style house set behind a low compound wall, its terracotta roof sagging gently in the middle, magenta bougainvillea rioting over the gate. A wooden board read: Sequeira Cottage. Guests Welcome. And already on the veranda, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel, was Isabella.
“You must be Anita. Come, come. You're melting, poor thing."
*
The cottage was two rooms off the side of the main house, connected by a jasmine-covered walkway, the scent of the flowers so thick in the heat it pressed against you like a second skin. It was clean and high-ceilinged and had no air conditioning. A ceiling fan moved slowly overhead, stirring the heat in lazy circles. On the windowsill, a small statue of Our Lady, her blue paint worn smooth at the hands.
Anita set down her bag and her equipment case, the heavy black one she had not opened in six months, and lay flat on the bed in her clothes.
The fan turned. Outside, somewhere in the thick canopy of the cashew orchard, a bird began its call. Not a song, but an ascent. The same phrase, escalating in pitch, before starting over.
Brainfever. Brainfever. Brainfever.
She had been a sound recordist for seven years. She had loved the strange intimacy of listening, the patience of coaxing a barely perceptible sound from beneath layers of noise. She had believed the world revealed itself most honestly through what people overlooked.
Lately she had stopped listening entirely.
*
Her phone lay on the mattress beside her. She knew what was on it. One voice note, six months old, that she had not been able to play. Arjun's voice. He had called four times that night between eleven and midnight. She remembered the stale air-conditioning of the studio, the headache behind her eyes after fourteen hours, the irritation, not concern, when she saw his name on the screen for the fourth time.
She had sent him a message.
Busy. Tomorrow.
The traffic policeman had answered when she called back the next morning.
Since then, the word tomorrow had become an unbearable room she lived in. She had come here because Palolem was as far as she could think to go. The Arabian Sea was at the end of the lane. She had a plan. She just needed a few days first.
The brain fever bird climbed its scale. The fan went around. Outside, nothing moved. The whole coast was waiting.
She slept.
*
She woke before dawn to the sound of dripping. Not rain yet, though the whole night had the feel of something on the verge. An old pipe somewhere in the main house, water tapping steadily into a steel bucket someone had placed beneath it. Tom. Tom. Tom. A patient, metronomic sound, and she lay still listening to it until the birds began. They began all at once, as if someone had thrown open a door: the whistling thrush first, liquid and extravagant in the dark, then the rapid knocking of the coppersmith barbet, then a dozen others she had no name for, the whole canopy alive and urgent.
A knock at the cottage door. Then Isabella's voice: “Anita? Tea?"
*
The kitchen was warm and smelled of coconut oil and cardamom. The tea was thick and sweet, the way her mother used to make it, and Anita looked out the window so Isabella would not see her face.
In the far corner of the veranda, in a wheelchair turned toward the orchard, sat an enormous old woman. Perfectly still. White hair pinned loosely at her neck. Hands resting in her lap like sleeping things. She was watching the cashew trees, or watching something beyond them, or watching nothing at all.
“That is Felix's mother," Isabella said. “Grandma Rose. Ninety-four."
The old woman had not moved. She sat with her face tilted very slightly upward, as if she were reading something in the sky that the rest of them had not yet learned to see.
*
Later, Felix took her around the grounds with the bearing of a man who had once commanded large vessels and had not entirely forgotten it. He showed her the orchard - mango, chiku, jackfruit, guava, jamun, coconut, and then the cashew trees. In the outhouse, a wood fire burned low beneath a round-bottomed clay pot, a thin tube leading from it to a trough of cold water, and from there a slow drip into a bottle. He muttered something about the cazcars being late this season, the way a man mutters about something that has always been and should always be.
“Last batch of the season," he said, holding up a bottle of pale, cloudy liquid, almost like diluted milk. “Urrak. From cashew apple. Once the rains come, finish. You must wait another year." He glanced at the sky as he said it, mechanically, the way a fisherman checks the horizon. She learned later, through the louvred window she left open for the heat, that he was making it to sell, that the money was for his mother's diapers and his youngest son's keds.
*
The main corridor of the house was covered with photographs. A young woman outside a small breakfast stall, laughing, children crowded around her. Then the same face, older, behind a basket of fruit at a market. Five children in school uniforms at various ages. A man appearing only in the earliest frames and then not at all. Anita stood before them a long time. A whole life in a corridor. A woman who had been left but had not left herself.
The boys each had their rhythm about the house: Miguel a drumbeat, Marcus a long silence, José a melody working itself out.
She was drawn into their rhythms without deciding to be. Isabella's cook began making her omelette the way she liked it without being asked. She found herself at the breakfast table each morning, tea in hand, watching the cat hunt the bars of sunlight that fell through the window and slid slowly across the tiles.
*
One afternoon, helping carry dishes to the kitchen after lunch, her phone slipped from her pocket as she bent for a plate. It struck the floor. The screen lit. And suddenly Arjun's voice filled the room.
“Akka, where are you? Amma says you're acting busy again." A burst of laughter. “If you don't answer, I'm telling her you've become one big pista."
Isabella glanced over from the sink. Miguel looked up from the table. Just a voice. Just someone's brother, looking for his sister.
Anita snatched the phone from the floor with shaking hands and walked out without a word.
She stood on the back step and did not go back in. The air outside was heavier than it had been that morning. The sky to the west had taken on a bruised, jamun-coloured edge. Somewhere in the orchard, the brain fever bird was still climbing. She didn't know how long she had been there when the door opened. José set a glass of water on the step beside her and sat down without a word.
“His name was Arjun," she said. “He was twenty-eight. He called me four times. I was in the studio, working. I sent him a message saying tomorrow."
She stopped.
“He died that night."
José looked at the orchard. “You don't know what he wanted to say."
“No."
He paused. “He probably just wanted to talk."
She knew this. The knowing was its own cruelty.
*
That evening she heard him in the corridor, his voice careful and tight: Mumma, I just want to bring over Zoya once, to meet everyone. A pause, then quietly: Not yet, José. You know how Grandma gets with new people. And after that, the silence of a young man walking away with his feelings under his arm.
She heard him later on the back step. The chords first, then the melody rising into air so still and heavy it seemed to hold the notes suspended, unwilling to let them go. Blackbird singing in the dead of night. He played it slowly, for the garden, for himself. From inside came a sound, a low, off-key crooning: Grandma Rose, in her wheelchair in the doorway, singing words from some other decade of her long life.
Biscuit, the fat Labrador, pressed his chin onto Anita's knee and looked up at her with the expression of someone who knew but was too kind to say.
*
The brain fever bird had been climbing its maddening scale for days, and now the air had changed. A heaviness settled over Palolem, the sky going the colour of pewter by afternoon, the cashew leaves turning their pale undersides to the sky. Felix glanced upward and said the rains would come in a day or two, maybe less. He worked urgently at his still, filling the last bottles of urrak before the monsoon arrived and ended the season.
It was six months since Arjun had died.
She had been watching this family manage — the diapers, the cricket fees, the leaking roof, the crumbling plaster, the chapel committee Felix presided over with such careful pride, and for days she had almost forgotten herself in the watching. Now the forgetting felt like a second betrayal. She lay under the fan in the thickening heat and felt the grief return in full, the way a tide returns, with no interest in what you have built on the sand.
Enough. She had come here for the sea. She had let herself be distracted by other people's lives. She owed Arjun this at least: to grieve him properly, completely, the way she had been unable to do in Bengaluru, where every room held a reason to hold herself together.
She borrowed the house scooter. The first fat drops of the season hit her arms as she started the engine, and the smell of rain on hot earth rose up around her, that smell, ancient and overwhelming, of something long overdue finally arriving.
*
The beach was empty. The sea was not the blue-green of tourist photographs but a deep, agitated grey, the clouds pressing down on it like a vast bed sheet pulled from the horizon. The waves came in long and heavy, collapsing on themselves with a sound like something tearing. She stood at the water's edge with her feet in the foam and felt very small and very clear, the way you feel in front of something large.
She had the phone in her hand. She had been carrying it for six months like a stone in her chest. She pressed play.
Arjun's voice came out of the small speaker, thin and present and unbearably alive: Akka, where are you? Amma says you're acting busy again. A burst of laughter. If you don't answer, I'm telling her you've become one big pista.
She listened to it four times. The rain came harder. She stood in it, facing the sea.
Then Miguel's voice behind her, cutting through the rain: “Anita-maan! Anita-maan."
She turned. Grandma Rose was at the edge of the beach path, her wheelchair pushed by Miguel, her white hair loose and wild in the wind. The old woman's face was turned up to the rain with an expression of absolute recognition, as if greeting a visitor she had been expecting.
Miguel caught Anita's eye and shrugged, the eloquent shrug of an eleven-year-old who has given up trying to understand the adults around him.
Grandma Rose opened her mouth and let the rain fall into it.
Anita walked toward them. She could not help it.
“Every year she asks for this," Isabella said, half-laughing, wiping rain from her face. “This year we said yes."
Anita knelt in the wet sand beside the wheelchair. Up close she could see the lines of the old face, her eyes the colour of old glass, focusing and unfocusing like a camera learning to see. Rose looked at her.
“Rachel," she said softly.
Anita opened her mouth to protest. Then closed it. “Yes," she said. “I'm here."
Rose took her hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong. She spoke slowly, not to Anita, not to anyone in particular, her voice just under the sound of the rain.
“I had five children and no husband," she said. “I sold fruit. I made breakfast for strangers. Then the children went to school. Then they grew." She turned her face back up to the rain as if it were the most natural thing, as if she had been waiting for it, specifically, to say this. “Every year it comes back. Ninety-four monsoons. Not one missed."
She looked at Anita then, directly.
“The boy who died," she said. “If it had been you. If he had missed your calls and you had died. What would you want for him?"
Anita imagined Arjun carrying this weight: withdrawing from his life, punishing himself daily, unable to hear his own laughter without guilt. It was unbearable. Arjun, who had called her one big pista for not picking up the phone. Arjun, who had laughed in that recording, easy and alive, just wanting to talk.
He would never have wanted this for her. Not a single day of it.
“He loved you," Rose said, as certain as the tide. “He would have forgiven you long before now."
Rain ran down the old woman's face. She looked entirely pleased with herself. Then she lifted the edge of her nightie and peered at the bulk of her wheelchair's seat cushion and said, with great dignity: “And these diapers. Ninety-four years, and now diapers. I tell God, you have a very peculiar sense of humour." She looked back at the sea. “But I am still here to tell him so. That is something, no?"
Anita sat back on her heels in the wet sand and laughed, a real laugh, torn out of her, strange in her own mouth, and her eyes were streaming and she could not tell the rain from the tears from the sea, all of it salt, all of it the body's ancient way of moving something through.
*
That evening José sat on the back step.
The rain had eased to a steady murmur. The garden was steaming. Everything smelled of wet earth and green things, the air washed clean, the way the world smells after a long wait finally breaks. Through the wet cashew leaves the last of the light filtered green and gold. The brain fever bird had gone quiet, the rains had silenced it for another year, and in its place a single nightjar called once from somewhere in the mango tree, then was still.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
Miguel sat beside his brother watching his hands, learning. Marcus had come out without being asked. Grandma Rose sat in the doorway in her shawl, eyes closed, lips moving with the words. Biscuit lay across the step in the way of everyone and didn't care.
Anita sat on the garden wall and opened the equipment case. Inside, the recorder lay exactly where she had left it. She picked it up and felt its familiar weight, the slight give of the rubber grip. She switched it on. The small screen flickered to life.
She raised the microphone toward the sound of the guitar, toward the nightjar in the mango tree, toward the first full rain of the monsoon falling on the orchard, on the old house, on the sea not far away.
She pressed record.
All your life, you were waiting for this moment to arise.
Blackbird fly.
Ranjani Sivakumar is a classical musician whose music draws attention for its aesthetics, vocal quality, finely calibrated style and a truthful expression. This rich experience has found yet another home. Ranjani has forayed into storytelling through the short story form, adding a new dimension to her creative life.
Banner image by Zetong-li downloaded by Unsplash.com