By Nilankur Das

She always remembered the last time she celebrated Christmas, as if the memory itself refused to dissolve into the blur of other nights, as if the cold air of Jharkhand had been preserved in her chest, ready to rise each December when in Goa the Mendonca family draped lights over their balcony and set out cakes heavy with rum and nuts, and she found herself not in the tiled kitchen scrubbing brass or carrying trays but on that hillock far away, with the banyan tree looming and the chapel glowing under the moon