Prologue: The Last Entry

EELA — 2017

It was almost time.

She had felt it for some days now — the slow withdrawal of the body from its own operations, the way the lungs took longer to fill, the way the heart seemed to pause between beats as though reconsidering whether the next one was worth the effort. Her fingers, once nimble enough to sketch a likeness in charcoal within minutes, now trembled when she lifted a pen. Her eyes, those bright blue eyes that every lover she had ever taken had remarked upon, saw the world through a veil of gauze that thickened with each passing week. The garden beyond the French windows was a wash of greens and golds, impressionist rather than realist, and she supposed there was a certain beauty in that — the world becoming a painting just as she was preparing to leave it.

Moti sensed it too. The little dog had not left her side in three days. She lay now at Eela's feet, her wiry coat pressed against the hem of Eela's cotton sari, her brown eyes tracking every movement with the particular vigilance of a creature that understood departure even if she could not name it. Moti was the last in a line that stretched back thirty years — Lalitha's great-granddaughter, carrying in her compact body the genetic memory of every dog that had lived in this house, that had pressed its nose against these same French windows and watched the garden shift through its seasons.

The diary was open on the table. She had been writing in it all morning, though morning was a generous description for the four sentences she had managed. Her shortest entry ever. The ink had dried unevenly on the page — her father's fountain pen was running low and she had not had the energy to refill it. She read the words back:

It's almost time. I am ready. Let it come quickly and decisively.

She paused. The pen hovered. There was something missing — something that needed to be said before the book closed for the last time. She had been writing in these journals since she was eighteen, since the day she arrived at RAF Lohegaon with a cardboard suitcase and a letter from her mother tucked into her blouse. Seventy-five years of words. Seventy-five years of recipes and sketches and observations and confessions and lies and truths and the slow accumulation of a life that had been, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.

She wrote: I am hopeful.

There. Let that be the last thing she committed to paper. Not a lament. Not a regret. Hope — that stubborn, irrational, beautiful thing that had kept her upright through every loss, every separation, every moment when the world had insisted she was wrong for loving the way she loved.

Last night she had left a note in the hall for Feroz. Dear Feroz — such a good man, such a good neighbour. He reminded her of someone, though she could never quite place who. The note asked him to leave everything as it was and contact Jai in Melbourne. It left instructions for Moti's care — the brand of biscuits she preferred, the specific spot behind her left ear that made her back leg twitch with pleasure, the fact that she would only drink water from the steel bowl, never the ceramic one. She had finished the note by apologising for the presumption that he would care for a dog that was not his, and wishing him future happiness.

There was a letter for Jai too. The conditions. The plan. He was a good boy — Jayant's son, her brother Vijay's grandson — and he had promised to execute her wishes without understanding them. She trusted him. Trust was not something she distributed widely, but when she gave it, she gave it completely.

She had stayed up all night. Sleep was a faithless companion these days — it came when she did not want it and fled when she needed it most. But last night she had been glad of the wakefulness because the jackals had come. She heard them first — that eerie, wavering cry that rose from the scrubland beyond the garden wall, the sound that had terrified her when she first moved back to this house thirty years ago and that now felt as familiar and necessary as her own heartbeat. Then she saw them — two shapes moving through the garden in the grey light before dawn, their bodies low and fluid, their eyes catching the kitchen light and throwing it back as two points of amber. The larger one — the female she had been watching for three years — stopped in the middle of the lawn and turned to face the house. For five minutes, perhaps longer, they regarded each other through the glass. Woman and jackal. Both old. Both survivors.

The jackal turned and slipped back through the gap in the wall. The smaller one followed. Eela watched them go and felt something lift inside her chest — not hope exactly, though hope was part of it. Recognition. The recognition that life, in all its forms, continued. That the garden would grow wild again after she was gone, and the jackals would come, and the monsoon would arrive in June as it always did, and the neem tree that her father had planted the year she was born would go on standing, indifferent to the small drama of one woman's death.

She pulled herself up from the chair. The movement cost her — a wave of dizziness, a throbbing behind her temples that felt like the sea crashing against a breakwater. She steadied herself against the table and waited for the room to stop swaying. Moti raised her head, alert.

'It's all right, Moti. I'm just going to the study.'

The study was a disaster. It had been a disaster for decades and she had resisted every attempt by well-meaning relatives to impose order upon it. The bookcases sagged under their burden. Journals — hundreds of them — leaned against the walls in precarious towers. Papers covered every surface, drifted across the floor, accumulated in the corners like sediment. The smell was extraordinary — old paper and dust and the particular mustiness of a room that had been accumulating memories for longer than most people had been alive. She breathed it in. She had lost her sense of smell years ago, mostly, but this room — this smell — she could still detect, faintly, like a radio signal from a distant station.

She placed the diary on top of a pile and looked around. Everything she needed to leave behind was here, or upstairs in the hidden cupboard behind the plasterboard that poor bewildered Alan had installed thirty years ago. The journals told the story. The cupboard held the evidence. And in the breakfast room, tucked inside the cover of Wuthering Heights — that book she returned to again and again, Heathcliff visiting Cathy on her deathbed, the ultimate star-crossed lovers — were two letters. One from Billu. One for Rajan.

She closed the study door and went to the kitchen. Moti followed. Eela took down the tin of dog biscuits — the expensive ones, the ones the shop in Koregaon Park called "artisanal" as though dogs cared about such distinctions — and gave Moti two.

'You, my dear, are a greedy little mongrel.'

Moti's tail thumped against the floor. Eela filled three steel bowls with water and placed them around the kitchen, then set out a generous portion of dried food. Just in case it was a while before anyone came.

She made chai. The last chai. She was slow about it — heating the water, adding the tea leaves and the crushed cardamom and the ginger that she grated with hands that shook so badly that her knuckles scraped the grater. She poured in the milk. Added sugar — too much sugar, always too much sugar, a habit she had never broken despite decades of medical advice. The smell of the cardamom rose with the steam and she closed her eyes and let it fill her. This, at least, she could still smell. This, at least, had not been taken from her.

She carried the cup to the breakfast room and settled into her chair — the chair that had been hers for thirty years, the chair from which she had watched a thousand dawns and a thousand dusks, the chair in which she had read Wuthering Heights so many times that the binding had cracked and the pages had yellowed and the words had become not words but music, not sentences but breath.

The garden was golden in the morning light. The neem tree threw long shadows across the lawn. Somewhere beyond the wall, a koel called — that ascending two-note cry that meant the hot season was coming, that the mangoes would soon be ripe, that the world was turning as it always turned, indifferent and beautiful.

She sipped her chai. She opened Wuthering Heights to the passage she knew by heart — Heathcliff at Cathy's deathbed — and let the words move through her one final time. The lump in her throat was familiar. She had cried over this passage more times than she could count. Let it count this last time. Let it hurt as much as it did in those lost days when she had read it aloud to Billu in the cottage, their legs tangled together on the narrow bed, the rain drumming on the tin roof.

The throbbing in her temples intensified. She put down the book and looked at the garden. For a moment — just a moment — she thought she saw someone standing beneath the neem tree. A figure, tall and elegant, with dark hair and that particular tilt of the head that she would have recognised across any distance, across any span of years. Her lips parted.

'Oh, it's you.'

Then the pain came — sudden, blinding, a white-hot wire drawn through the centre of her skull — and she heard a sound that she thought was Moti howling but was, she realised with distant surprise, herself. The garden disappeared. The light disappeared. There was only darkness, and she was falling through it, and the last thing she felt was the warmth of the chai cup slipping from her fingers, and the last thing she smelled was cardamom, and the last thing she heard was the koel — that ascending cry, that two-note song of heat and sweetness and the turning of the world.

So this was it, then.

She was not afraid.