Hungry Ghosts

If they were to kill her, her ghost would still be dancing.

Their eyes searched silently for any sign of life, waiting for some flock of egrets to slingshot out from the bushes, waiting for a single mulletfish to brush the river’s crest, even hoping for a distant whiff of cow dung. Even shit has life in it, after all.

She supposed that was the nature of things – sons look to their fathers when they are healthy and to their mothers when they are hurt.

A man in the day and a man in the night is two different creatures.

Even without a mouth, the woman can scream, she said. Even without a stomach, one can go hungry. And even in death, one can lust for life.

He smelled different. She was so used to him smelling like the land – his musk like soil and freshly cut grass.

In bad dreams, you have to search for the normal and hold onto it before you sink.

All drinking occurred in twilit solitude. Owned books for the sake of their jackets, not their words. Owned art that he neither admired nor analysed.

And so, the devotees were asked: would you forgive a man for mistaking your child for an animal?

The forest can only swallow so many bones.

He’d always wanted to know how the insides of bodies looked. The beautiful spectra of tissue and organ.

The few words of English she spoke could not come together – the man had convinced her that the word for Help was Cluck. And so she clucked for her sons when he brought them to see her.

There is the silence that lingers and the silence that devours. It is that latter type of silence that only occurs when you know something is listening out for you. That something is out there.

Demons howling from the mountain. In the sky was the infinite. At first, unnecessarily spacious and arbitrary and disorganised, eating itself and getting fatter and fatter like a tumour. Too big for itself. Too big for God, even. But in the black echo, it made sense.

She was many animals at once. A chimera of chimeras.

At first, he dealt with the things other men in her life wouldn’t have dared to. He bathed her, sang her to sleep, cleaned her shit. If he had breasts, he would have fed her. But after the first two months, he tired of such things. Was as if he had expected the baby to take care of herself after a few months had passed. When she’d developed a rash on her leg, he told Shweta that it would go away on its own. During her bout of colic, he said the same thing. And when she died, she now wondered if some veiled part of him basked in relief.

This was no longer a fight, Krishna realised. This was a point of no return.

They could touch you, but you have to learn not to feel it.

You aint need to ask scorpions to sting, Lata.

Birds in the sky. Fish in the river. Crickets in the night. God put them there and they never have to worry about trying to be anything else in this world. That’s where God put them and they stay there and do well with it. And if they do well with it, God will put them in a better place in the next life. That’s what their mother had always told her boys. That’s what the woman told herself.

Some people wait for God to decide for them, he said. This isn’t how it is supposed to be. No one knows how it is supposed to be, he told his sons. People are betrayed by their own intelligence. The truth is neither here nor there – it will be there one moment and disappear the next. The truth is on the tip of your nose. You can barely see it most of your life. But you look at yourself for long enough, and you will. When that moment comes, snatch it and eat it, and you will come out alive.

A corbeau will always be a corbeau – hated by the world that it will eventually eat.