Selva’s mother has wanted a house for so long that she does not care that this one has teeth. She picks paints with names like Pale Woodrose, Drifting Dune, and Sierra Foothills. Buys lamps that cast soft liquid-sheen patterns of light on the wall. The teakwood beds take three people two whole days to manoeuvre and assemble. She agonises over the floors, the curtains, the polishing of mahogany, sheesham, and rosewood, and complains that she feels vaguely anxious all the time.
Selva thinks the house doesn’t feel right, a thing slipping sideways, pinned in place against its will.
Monsoon clouds amble like big grey elephants across the sky. Outside the windows, the sea, the coconut palms tall and strong, the paddy fields green. It rains so much, and for so long, that the water eventually covers the lawn. It will bring the country to its knees, Selva thinks. But when he wakes up in the morning everything’s fine.
The house finds its way to him at night. The curtains grow in the shadows and creep across the floor to wrap around his body, caress him with ropey fingers, and close calico palms across his mouth.
Sometimes it’s the walls and doors that silently tumble across the room, quick, glowing motion lines strobing back and forth until they settle sarcophagus-like around him.
In the morning, it’s as if none of this happened.
In the morning, sometimes there’s the smell of jasmine and roses, or faint music, sometimes birds hopping in unafraid, sometimes a cool breeze.
Selva fixes the wires coming out of its skin, the loose tiles that tilt under his feet. But the house is old and angry, there’s only so much he can do. Sometimes it doesn’t want him in a room, or wants him in one. He doesn’t mind, he finds little bends in time in which he makes corners for himself.
The house starts to resent it when he leaves. One evening he walks in, he’s taking his shoes off, steadying himself with his hand on the doorframe, when the door slams shut. The pain blossoms in his mind like Kandinsky circles. His nails go from red to purple to yellow, they blacken and fall off.
Now that she has what she wants, his mother doesn’t turn off the tv, getting off the couch only to eat. She eats like her hunger won’t end, her feet constantly taking her to the kitchen. She tells him, Selva, sometimes my mouth is working, and I don’t know what I’m eating, all I know is that I must. One thing, then another.
She wakes up thinking about lemon tarts, biriyani garnished with birista and cashews fried in ghee, and the big juicy burgers of advertisements.
Her dreams are filled with feasts and she swells like a sail.
The walls get fatter and the windows keep sealing themselves shut. He’s careful to avoid the slamming doors and falling objects on his way out now.
Lips and thighs, and breasts and eyes, and hands and hair. Rising and falling. The shapes of rivers and sand dunes. He wants to be them, and he’s nothing like them. He wants to be like something bought at a jewellery store and put on a shelf for everyone to see.
He wants to fold his body flat, make little cuts with scissors and unfold it into a paper–doll chain like a magician. This silver-streaked fritillary beast that is standing in his room covered in shadowed scars that look like barbed wire.
The mice get into everything, his sweaters unravel, and he thinks he smells like turpentine.
He uses a chisel to pry the windows open.
It is tiring.
Where is his mother? Did she eat herself?
He finds a lifeless rat. He takes the formless thing outside, light as a ghost, soft as an empty velvet purse. The house easily lets go.
He feels its eyes on him while he digs a hole and places the shoebox coffin in it. Wet eyeballs slithering all over his body.
He goes to bed with mud on his hands.
§
Selva is watching her phone screen, Agastya is watching his. With his caramel hair and money talk, Sotheby’s tie and Sotheby’s suit, Oliver Barker is saying, “You’re saying five million pounds? That’s more like it.” Selva whispers ka-ching! ka-ching! under her breath.
Agastya asks her what she thinks of the farmers’ protests, and answers his own question, “I don’t think they’ll achieve critical mass, not with such isolated pockets of resistance.” His hands stroke the inside of Selva’s thighs and he says with his mouth too close to her ears, “I say that’s bad optics.”
Selva tells him, “It’s as if you can’t see what I see.” And Agastya says, “I can see that you’re doing nothing.”
Selva shifts to be closer to him, and says, “You’re wrong,” without taking her eyes off Emma with the pearl headband who is talking efficiently into the phone. A woman in a leather jacket leans forward on her elbow like James Dean. Everyone has great hair, Selva thinks. “Six million six,” someone says in the video. Emma nods seven million, and Selva says, “I hate the word optics, it sounds stupid.”
On Selva’s phone, maybe Oliver Barker, maybe someone else, says, “Against you, Emma. It’s sold, Alex, to you.” But, wait, there’s murmuring among the auctioneers.
Agastya says something about tits. Selva laughs at the look on Oliver’s face and turns to Agastya, “What were you saying about tits?”
Agastya apes her laugh and says she’s too loud, “Why the fuck can’t you keep your voice down? You want the neighbours to know we’re talking about tits at 2 a.m.?”
Agastya doesn’t know that Selva’s got pharmaceuticals up to her eyes like a gumball machine. She asks him, “What’s bothering you, Agastya? My laugh? My tits? 2 a.m.? What?” She doesn’t tell him that for a week now she has not liked how he smells. She used to, but doesn’t anymore.
Oliver leans forward, beaming, ready to spring like a tiger. His face says aha, go on, I’m listening, I’m listening, and he says, “Shh, have a bit of peace and quiet, thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” He’s pleased when they follow his gentle command. “At eight million four hundred thousand pounds. Try one more.”
And they all quietly laugh and laugh. What’s a million between friends?
Selva’s eyes are glued to Oliver who is playing to the gallery, “Last chance, it’s a great opportunity at eight million five hundred thousand pounds.” Oliver has a dance coiled up inside him. “Emma, congratulations,” he says, “Sold.”
Fireworks explode outside and Selva remembers standing on the terrace and watching thick plumes of smoke rising in the distance behind the buildings. She looks up the Wikipedia entry on her phone and reads it out to Agastya, “The Concerned Citizens Tribunal Report estimated that as many as 1,926 may have been killed.” And Agastya says, “What do you care?” He takes the phone away from her. He takes her hands in his and sends them roving all over his body. Pressing her fingertips against his skin like so. And he says like a litany, “This is the penile artery. This is the glans. These are bumps that will turn to skin tags when I’m fifty. The hair’s pretty thick here. Spirals out here. Thins out here. Some men have to shave their ears every day, imagine.”
Selva takes her hands back and says, “Look at me, Agastya.” But Agastya doesn’t look at her. Instead, he clambers roughly over her and says, “You have such a nice mouth, and it’s all for me.”
§
His mother calls him to look at the dead homunculus in the living room. But he acts like he’s never seen it before. “Homunculus? Me?” So she sends him off to a wellness centre recommended by a friend. It’s run by a woman called Kiki, who is a therapist.
Kiki the therapist. The therapist Kiki.
At the reception they make him fill out a form. Under Name, he writes: Selva. He feels like he cannot look at his name anymore, but he fills it out anyway. He tries to decide if he has suicidal thoughts or not, and ticks the box next to Sometimes, because doesn’t everybody? Then a man in a half-sleeved polyester shirt who looks like the man who played Richard Sackler in that TV show about the opioid epidemic in America scans his fingers and tells him that it is clear Selva suffers from high anxiety.
The fingerprint scans feed into a computer screen that shows the outline of a person sitting in padmasana with chakras marked out in different colours. The receptionist angles the screen towards him, as if to say, look, look how bad it is, good thing we caught it before it was too late. Selva’s chakras are out of alignment. The crown chakra is floating away to the right, the third eye chakra to the left, the throat chakra is not too far from the centre so his problems with communication might be an easy fix. The heart chakra, solar plexus chakra and sacral chakra have arranged themselves randomly to the far left. And the root chakra — that one’s so far out only half of it is seen on screen. Could be they needed bigger screens. Or could be that Selva is just not himself anymore.
“It’s fear of abandonment,” Kiki tells him. Her red bra peeks through the strained buttons of a copper-coloured shirt. He tells her about the drugs, the cheating, the mysterious backache that he thinks is cancer because he smokes. She tells him to scream, and then he’s punching cushions, and then before he knows it four sessions have ended and she’s telling him to walk into the garden like he’s walking into a new life. She says it’s a temporary repair, she can’t fix him in four hours. She needs more time, she says. “Selva, I want you to be happy,” she says. She tells him he would benefit from singing bowl therapy. Her interns can do it for a nominal fee. Selva smiles at her like Yue Minjun smiles at China.
When he gets home his mother’s baking shortbread biscuits. Like they’re in a cottage in the English countryside, instead of bumfuck nowhere. Perhaps he’s imagining it, but she looks smaller. His hands look for things to clean.
Things must be clean. The house must be clean. He must be clean. Inside and outside.
§
Agastya notices a woman standing by the side of the highway, slows down and reverses. “Do you need help?” he asks her. She says that her car’s out of fuel. It’s getting dark, and the next petrol pump is an hour away according to the map on her phone. Could he drop her off there? Agastya smiles, “Of course, it’s not safe out here after dark.”
She’s not too tall, hair tied up in a messy bun, oversized t-shirt, trackpants, sneakers, her left arm stacked with thin black glass bangles. The streetlights flicker and turn on as she locks her car and walks to his, and even in the yellow pallor he sees that she is dark, lotus-eyed, delicate as a parrot. Already, Agastya will lift mountains and set fire to Lanka for her.
Once inside his car, she tells him to please call her Andal, and takes off the clip holding her hair in place, sending soft waves cascading around her face. The scent of jasmine fills the air. Agastya thinks he will blaze to death. He feels like an intoxicated elephant.
At the petrol pump they find out that there is a nationwide strike that went into effect at 6 pm to protest cuts in excise duties on fuel. The security guard does not understand how neither of them knows this, it was all over the news. They were travelling, they tell him, they weren’t paying attention to the news. He shakes his head at the carelessness of people with cars and goes back to smoking his bidi.
Agastya asks Andal where she needs to go, and is both relieved and elated to find out that they’re headed in the same direction. They agree it’s best if he drops her home. He flares in love, incandescent and helpless.
The four-hour drive is silent. Andal sleeps, Agastya navigates the pouring rain. He considers waking her up to tell her not to get into cars with strange men. But, of course, he doesn’t. He practises an imaginary conversation in which he asks her for her phone number.
When they get to the city she asks if he could please stop at a paan shop and get lime. He thinks it’s a strange request, but does it anyway. He follows her directions which take them to a narrow dimly-lit road with paddy fields on either side. He wonders how he’ll ever find his way back.
She tells him to stop in front of an old style naalukettu house with sloping red roofs. It looks gloomy till she gets out and flicks on a light switch at the entrance. He waits in the car, wondering how he could stay a little longer.
When she asks him if he wants to come in and wait till the rain eases off his shoulders feel like mountains.
They take their shoes off at the door and he follows her in, mesmerized by the lift and fall of her feet on the red Athangudi tiles. He has a million questions, but he thinks she might disappear if he asks. She makes them coffee, her bangles clinking quietly as she boils the water, adds spices, coffee, jaggery, and pours it through the strainer.
The verandah has two old planter’s chairs they sit on to watch the rain fall on the trees that surround the house. Agastya feels himself soften like he’s eaten datura. After a while, she asks, “Do you have the lime?” opening the lid of a brass box he hadn’t noticed before, and takes out two betel leaves. Agastya thinks this the first time that she truly sees him. All this while she has been talking at him like he only serves a short specific function, like how he talks to cab drivers. He brings out the small plastic box of lime from his shirt pocket and hands it to her. She expertly applies a thin film of it on each leaf, adds spices, saffron, rose preserve, folds the leaves into quids and holds one out to him.
She gives him a tour of the house. Her parents are in Canada, they’ll only be back in the winter when it gets too cold there, she tells him. Like the walls, the furniture looks old and solid and immovable. If not for her, he thinks he’d find the house oppressive. Something about it is claustrophobic and prison-like.
In the kitchen doorway that leads to the backyard, she points into the dark with her bangles tinkling and tells him that there’s a large pond there. It’s too dark to see anything, but the rain sounds different falling on water, and the sound of crickets and cicadas is louder. She leans forward, and spits out the paan. He does the same. She collects rainwater in her cupped palms to cleanse her mouth. He does the same. She turns to him and kisses him. And they taste the same.
He can feel his knees pressed against her body. Her hand against the side of his neck.
In her room, on her bed, in the dark, her hair smells of jasmine, her body of vetiver. He presses his face into the curve of her waist, and swallows the smell of roses. He dots with kisses the sandalwood of her back. Then the curtains rise with the wind and when the moonlight falls on her body he sees a familiar scar.
“This cannot be you,” he says uncertainly. Andal pins him under her body, he does not resist, like a butterfly. Now he looks at her. “You’re not me, so how can you know I’m not me?” she says.
She eats through his phalanges, metatarsals, tarsals. Out of the corner of her eye she sees the windows widen. Agastya hears his fibula snap. He hears wolves in the sky, but it’s the sound of his flesh being stripped from his bones. His eyes meet hers and he sees her mouth working against bone and tendon, his organs exploding between her teeth. He feels like in the painting of Christina’s world, with Christina’s lifeless legs.
“You’ve turned into your mother,” he tells her, and she bites his tongue off and spits it out on the floor. Together, their heads turned to it in the same direction like lovers, they watch the mangled thing writhe towards the door and disappear into the night. Andal’s wrists grow thinner and her bangles slip off.
In the morning she leaves his hair and teeth under a coconut palm. She covers herself in bamboo, fireflies, and red ochre, and places on her head a yellow black casque. She sees shadows move in the gable window. The house has spread itself across the land.
A marigold floats down the Periyar, bees nestle in the kurinji flowers, and Andal sleeps with her eyes half-open like the mouths of kinkini bells.
It is the last rainstorm of the season.