SIMULACRA by Manini Nayar
San Diego is a vexing tooth. The kind you can’t pull out or just leave there, a filament of pain under the gums demanding both dismissal and attention. A threat, minor but insistent. A looming gap. An anchored presence. A nuisance. Still, Nina is unfazed. By this, her first journey anywhere in seven years. And no wonder. She has withstood another kind of menace – a cancer survivor she is called by her neighbors in South Bend, the sort of term you wear awkwardly like a borrowed hat, an ill-fitting defense against other losses too untenable to name. Outwardly she is the same as always, a slight woman with a sharply angled face and a lithe but softening frame, something between a ferret and a kitten. Her gray pencil skirt and black leather handbag lend her a severity she assumes when meeting strangers, as she must in a few minutes – her ex‑husband Siddharth and his wife – their old familiarity just a memory, and this new encounter a cautious negotiation.
Nina steps out onto the tarmac, into the hot San Diego sun, held in a wash of unmitigated light. Blinded for a moment, she catches her breath to steady her after five hours in the plane’s cool and dimly droning interior. Sunlight blazes everywhere, stripping her of reference and history; she is incandescent, looking for reprieve from the glare.
“Ooh, it’s hot!” announces the child beside her, shaking out her long brown hair as she slips her hand into Nina’s. But she is just a child, and so for her, heat, like broccoli or nightly prayers, is just a fact of life not to be contested. The child is not complaining.
“We’ll walk to that big building there,” says Nina, pretending confidence and pointing to the terminal a hundred feet away. “They’ll be waiting.”
The child picks up her pace, skips and hops in anticipation. She wears a purple cotton skirt with bright silver sequins, and on her hair is a pink velvet Alice band. Her tiny beaded black purse jangles against her hips as she moves, creating a stir, a hint of music, reminding Nina of the silver anklets she wore as a child. The child dips her head left to right, right to left, in pace with each skip she takes. She is like a monkey or a princess. A monkey princess.
“I feel happy,” says the child. Now she’s skipping like a feather buffeted in the wind.
“If I hold my breath,” wonders the child, “can I stop time and always be happy? If I count to ten or a hundred?”
The child is full of questions.
“You can’t do that,” says Nina reasonably. “Then you’d be a ghost. Only ghosts stop time.”
“I can be a ghost,” says the child, delighted. “Boo!”
The child is incorrigible.
Nina is a little out of breath with pulling along two heavy carry-ons, one of which holds an expensive present. A Kanjeevaram russet sari with a gold brocade border for the new wife, who (it was explained to her over the telephone by Siddharth) likes all things Indian. The new wife is an excellent sous chef as well as a top real estate agent. This stellar combination fails to dislodge Nina’s fortitude. She has long battled unsympathetic realtors and her Homeowner’s Association, both disapproving of her disorderly management skills, her once-white picket fence and overgrown front lawn. Now with two mortgage payments past due and under threat of foreclosure, Nina has resorted to domestic rituals for sustenance. She steams bland mountains of basmati rice to assuage her anxiety. She scouts Food Network for recipes introduced with the magical phrase: Scale of Difficulty: EASY. It’s astonishing how many recipes fall into this category – and not just rice and pasta, but tandoori chicken, chocolate cake, rasam. The results, as the child tripping along beside her often points out, range from laudable to regrettable (or in the child’s more robust opinion, either mmm, okay or eeew!). For Nina, convenience trumps quality. Siddharth, on the other hand, never shied away from effort, scouting always for the better thing, the better make (Scale of Difficulty: CHALLENGING), though his ambitions in the early days were humbler, limited to hunting down gourmet coffee packets in grocery aisles with the single-mindedness of a colonial explorer.
Nina has admitted to herself that the new wife is the most gourmet of coffee packets, a superior version of Nina’s former self – energetic, sociable, rich in empathy. Descriptions that no longer apply to Nina, especially now when being on her own has turned her into a bristle-brush with feet. She takes offense quickly and mines everyday parlance for offhand betrayals or camouflaged insults. But she remains brisk and focused. The secret is not to become a wet rag, a mop, a bore. This is what I’ve come to, she thinks. A life measured by a catalogue of domestic touchstones, an imagination powered by the very condition it resists.
Nina and the child have packed their belongings in two small pieces of hand luggage because they don’t plan to stay long in San Diego, only five days. Nina’s excuse, prim as befits an English adjunct professor, is that work beckons – doesn’t it always? – though Nina has no summer job; her teaching contract resumes in September. So the carry-ons contain just a mismatched clutch of underthings and shirts (the extra in case of mishaps or spills – for no matter if one is four or forty-something, accidents are possible. Anything can happen, anywhere, at any time. This is a lesson to be learned). Jeans, a swimsuit, T‑shirts, dresses and a salwar kameez. The requisite toothbrush and cosmetics. Their luggage is tightly packed. The brocade-border sari will need to be ironed before presentation, and Nina can only hope the expensive chocolates for Siddharth have not melted. He was a fool for sweet things. Is a fool for this new one who cooks and sells houses like lemonade.
The child is at an age where everything is a wonder – a snail, a phrase, marbled cookies. No terrain for her is awkward, neither tarmac nor open sky from which she has just descended like a chirpy god. Nina, earthbound with prudence, can only marvel; the ground beneath her feet is hard and gritty, ready to give way in a clatter of pebbles or careening fear. But the child, half-airborne, seems to fly.
“Look, Mom!” the child sings, as if on cue, hopping and skipping, arms extended like an airplane, her black bag twirling. Nina is forced to hurry gracelessly beside this dervish, suggesting to fellow passengers tramping onward at either side of them that a family or eager lover awaits her at the gate.
“Look at my feet!” The child is tap-dancing, hip-hopping, any moment now she will trip and land on her nose, and what kind of entrance to San Diego will that be? Bloodied, Nina expected that, but not literally.
“That’s lovely,” says Nina. “But stop now. We’re almost there.”
No one is at the gate.
“They’ll be waiting inside the terminal,” says Nina anxiously. Or perhaps they won’t. Perhaps they’ve gone home.
Her apprehension lifts and falls in hiccups. She remembers why her neighbor Alice was suspicious of so wayward a journey. You’re going to visit your ex? And he’s married? A situation that deleted two possibilities at once. Not a potential husband. Not even a recoverable one. But other friends were sympathetic. Closure, said one, as if Siddharth were a zipper left undone.
She sees the two of them now by the big glass front doors and is momentarily surprised that they look so small against the towering panes, even if such a distortion is only an illusion of geometry and distance.
Siddharth had once seemed larger than life; perhaps that was the illusion. A man always in flight, even their conversations held in transit as he entered or left the house, the car, the marriage. A marriage needn’t fail; it can just pass you by. Now he seems slight and immobile, has lost twenty pounds, peering lightly through his horn-rimmed glasses at her, his black hair thinning at the temples. He is dressed in brown corduroy pants and a white open-necked shirt. His nose is still a quick straight line, not sensuous, almost paternal, his lips thin blades, although his skin has absorbed a sallow sheen from the California sun. He is elegant in a cufflinks-and-striped-tie sort of way. Nina takes inventory of this strange familiar man, testing his new substance against memory, seeing how all the parts and hinges fall into place like a door firmly shut. The child hides shyly behind Nina.
So many hugs! And welcomes. And this new wife, her name is Margie, a pliable friendly word denoting hope and brightness. She is taller than Siddharth by half a head, her face is high cheek-boned and sculpted, the nose slightly askew as if challenging the pretensions of the face. Her light green sundress falls in a precipice into her flat stomach, how trim her body. She exercises daily, runs a mile, eats organic. Nina breathes in, must stop herself. Enough of this. She must extend her arms. She must unbristle and flow. She hugs Margie.
“Welcome,” says Margie cheerfully, and Nina is disconcerted by so heartfelt a reception.
The child peeps out from behind Nina at this festive commotion. Welcome, cry these sudden hosts, to her, to the world it seems. Welcome, welcome!
No one thinks to stop speaking as the SUV hurtles homewards. Siddharth is full of questions and observations, careful with his phrasing, shaping words deliberately. He speaks little of himself though, saying nothing of the move from Los Angeles last year, the burgeoning software company, the possibility of a partnership with his Korean boss. Seven years is a breath in suspended time. See you later, Mom.
News of Siddharth’s rising career comes to Nina via gossipy relatives in India, second, third, fourth-hand, in a looping arc of connections like a train with too many stops. But now he chatters on, his breezy words lifting her half-dazed into a pleasant stupor. You’d think he was a brother, all this family talk with no reference to their shared and jumbled past. How are her parents back home in Bangalore? He’s sorry to know her father is almost blind, difficult for a man who loved reading the newspaper every morning. A shame! And Maitreya, her sister in Mumbai – the oil magnate’s wife? (He has a name, thinks Nina, mildly irritated. Mohan. Not OilMagnate). And he’s heard little cousin Kamila in Alabama won’t marry Prakash, that poor sod, after all these years. Well, not that little – she must be – what? – at least thirty-five? Why not marry Prakash? He could someday be vice president at Intel, even move to the US. Wouldn’t that make her parents happy? Kamila needs a man! And Jeannette, thinks Nina, is his name. He’s a she and wears suspenders. They’d marry if it were legal in Alabama. This information she doesn’t share; why qualify the moment? Siddharth’s voice floats over them, miasmic but still insistent in its grilling. Your teaching job going well? Mostly boring stuff, or are you on to Shakespeare and things of that sort? And these Indian writers these days – they’re all over the place, lift a page and you’ll find one pontificating! And did you notice they’re getting younger every day? O Rushdie, where art thou? And your health! (He won’t mention cancer. Past history. Why sully this jolly day?) What about your allergies? And peanuts – I remember how badly you reacted to our visit to the peanut farm in Valparaiso! Your skin in hives! And that peanut butter scare last spring – in Florida, was it, or Texas? So much for the overhauled FDA! The more things change, etc!
A silence ensues for a moment, but Nina can see hanging in the air !!!!!! and yet more !!!!!! The car is full of unspoken !!!!!! She stifles a laugh, turns it into a cough. So many exclamation points, thinks Nina quickly contrite, all lined up in a row – not bowling pins, not things to strike – just muddled armature she must not cross.
Nina is sorry. Her presence has brought on this verbal welter from Siddharth in which she will drown if she pays the slightest attention. And she feels a guilt she can barely repress. His violent patter, this artillery of good cheer that arises out of helplessness – he will pummel her with it in rounds through the coming days until she puts a stop to it, until she shuts him up, it’s her hand now on the latch. But she will wait out the line of fire, and she will forgive without the burden of acknowledgement or confession.
So Nina turns to Margie and tells her how much she has been looking forward to this visit. Margie, taken unawares, says this is why she loves India, people are so open and without guises. She means this new incarnation of Siddharth, of course, some new saintlike entity with whom Nina has not yet been acquainted.
But still, in this way they have each cleaned out a window. The child is hiding in a seat at the back of the SUV, humming something incomprehensible and muted.
The house is as she had expected it to be, a white adobe-like structure with three square bedrooms, a pebbled driveway, and a shingled rooftop much like the one over her own childhood home in Dehradun. A home she’d left behind for good, despite her mother’s ambivalence, for graduate school in Colorado, and then for a life of paperwork and lecture halls in towns across monochromatic midwestern states.
Nina looks confidently at this child beside her; this one will not leave home – never, not once, not even for school. She’s right here where she wants her. Nina wants to laugh but the sound is impossible, twisted in her throat.
At the end of so many missing worlds, this seamless house.
“Let me give you the Grand Tour,” says Margie, not in the least ironic.
Nina remembers that Margie is a real estate whiz.
The living room, sedate in teak furniture and swaths of burgundy and cream, abuts a dining room with hardwood floors and a kitchen with shining stainless steel appliances. The bedrooms, flush off a narrow hallway, are subdued in shades of beige. The whole place drips with chandeliers hung like giant earrings from every ceiling; these fixtures seem at odds with the stucco structure, a house uncertain of its provenance. (And thereby an apt fit for Siddharth. Neither Indian nor American. An eclectic man rather than a man with eclectic tastes. Nina wonders if his friends call him Sid.)
“You won’t believe the deal we got on this casa,” says Margie, all proud energy and focus. “Thanks to the economy.”
Still not a shade of irony. No hint of their misfortune is my joy. Nina envies such directness. She opens her mouth to say something supportive and cheerleading, but thinks instead of foreclosures and Sheriff’s Sales. But Indiana is far away, at least for now.
Most exciting is the kidney-bean-shaped pool in the backyard.
How beautiful it is, like the sea. The house is ten miles away from the Pacific Ocean, deep inland, so this curve of water substitutes well. The pool is an eye-opener for the child who is not used to such extravagance in South Bend. She squeals in joy and skitters sideways like a pony before an undulating field of blue. Where she comes from, the winters bring frost-crusted mornings and ice on sidewalks clear as windowpanes. In California, every day is a balm with nothing resistant to pit life against. This is why, Nina tells herself again, she is here; to rest in golden suspension, to drift in amber.
“It’s been too long,” observes Margie brightly, offering Nina a glass of lemonade as she sits by the pool trailing lines with her feet in the silken water. “You must come often. This is your home too. Isn’t it, Marvin?”
A fat black cat curled under her chair glares suspiciously at Nina. As if.
“Thank you. Yes, of course,” says Nina dutifully, though she wonders where this gathering will eventually lead, into what unstated complicity or guttered pause.
Margie is kind, like a mother, except that Nina does not need one, must instead be one.
Margie loves the sari, admires the intricate brocade border. “Can you imagine anyone working on this by hand?” Her index finger traces the waves and whorls of filigree on the shimmering cloth. “This must have taken weeks!”
The cat yawns, unimpressed.
“Marvin loves it,” says Margie. “Don’t you, Marvin?’
Margie will wear the sari in a day or two, after she’s ironed out the creases. Nina promises to help drape it around her, each pleat descending in a courtly sweep. Margie will be an Indian princess. Siddharth has gallantly pronounced the chocolates his favorite brand.
All is well. Tomorrow they will visit SeaWorld, and then the zoo with its huffing, chuffing train.
Still, Nina is attentive only in part. She is intent on watching the child jump in and out of the water with a giant rubber ducky-dingy around her waist. Next year the child will have to take swimming classes. This summer Nina must watch over her, call out cautionary directives:
“Not so deep!”
“Get back here!”
“Move to the left!”
Siddharth and Margie look briefly at each other. Margie raises an eyebrow. She seems worried, perhaps because she has no children. A displacement of sympathy, thinks Nina, for which there really is no need. Nina feels an unexpected rush of affection, a stab of happiness she has not expected. It catches her unawares like a birthing cramp.
A walk around the neighborhood, then, to shake off the pool water, to breathe in the California afternoon. So salubrious it is, so energizing, Nina can almost feel each breath she takes fill her body with a lightness she can scarcely bear. I’m like a balloon, she whispers to the child, who is tugging at her fingers, pulling her along. She seems to float behind the child, such a wafting celebration. She could be a burst of colors all on her own. The moment passes. Stray clouds lengthen across the afternoon sky, joy stretched into vapor.
“Hungry,” announces the child. She’s getting a little withered by the brilliant camaraderie of this day.
“Me too,” says Nina, surprising herself, embarrassed to be heard aloud.
Siddharth and Margie have caught only the second part of this exchange. Me too. They walk step in step like a set of casual soldiers. They too. They two. Onwards and upwards, thinks Nina, here I am. Here we go. A small unpracticed army, they cross a row of crooked streets with houses pushing toward the curb; windows, doors, porches, all clustered and spilling into unattended front yards. Yards poised as if in motion, waiting for a starting gun to sound their clumsy charge. A tricycle upended, a row of empty stucco flower pots, a garden hose snaking across a driveway, inexplicable white drifts of a toilet roll hanging from a window. Metal, mud, mortar, concrete, paper. Nina touches her wrist briefly. Blood and stone.
An ice cream truck jingles out into the street, as if sent on cue. Who’s for ice cream? Everyone, it seems. Vanilla all around. Vanilla people. Just everyday sorts with a turn for candy sprinkles, candy bits, gummies, nuts. Nina and the child opt for sprinkles. Siddharth smiles vaguely, as if such excesses are far beyond his ken. His ice cream cone is left plain, without adornment. A solid swirl without nuance on a sugar cone.
Margie will have gummies.
“Yummy gummies,” Margie says loudly as if to amuse the child. Who is not amused or even listening. Instead the child is naming the colors on her sprinkles, picking each one out with a trampoline-jumpy finger. Orange, blue, green, yellow, white, purple, black, pink, violet, red. And because of the punishing humidity of the afternoon heat, a runny one in violet-red. The child counts these colors quickly. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. Ten-almost-eleven.
On the way home they are accosted by a man with a very large black mustache, the razor-thin edges of which look primed for battle.
The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, says the man politely, with just a hint of menace. He must be about 60 years old, guesses Nina. The rest of him seems an unlikely battlefield. His hair is not more than a profusion of erratic silver lines glinting off a shining pate. His trousers are a worn brown corduroy and his white shirt shows ancient signs of mustard and ketchup, even a streak of black grease, its origins uncertain. The man is German, or pretending to be. He ends his sentences with “nein” – confusing Nina who imagines this an abbreviated sobriquet to address her in some familiar if occluded manner.
The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, nein?
On the contrary, says Nina a bit stiffly, my belief is that it rains everywhere in Spain, though possibly with greater velocity and frequency on the plain, if you say so.
The Could-be-German man eyes her unsympathetically.
There are wars, he says. In Palestine, Israel, Syria, the Congo, Ukraine. Airplanes are blown up, people are kidnapped. Areas around the South China Sea are not promising tourist destinations. The prognostication for the world is just not good, any way you cut it. All these things are possible or already here. Your ice cream is vanilla. Your ex‑husband prefers it plain. Sprinkles are a lie, unless they’re in Spain and of the hydraulic variety. The weather everywhere is in your head.
Stop, commands the child, tugging at Nina’s fingers. Stopstopstop!
A dream is like an ice cream cone, gratifying but impermanent.
Dreams stop time, objects the Could-be-German, looking injured. Boo!
Here we are, cries Margie. They have reached the adobe house with its dripping, lighted chandeliers. Home again!
By evening, the child is asleep, suddenly without warning (but not unexpectedly, after all that swimming and busy skittering), collapsing into a deep and intense silence. Nina tucks a cotton sheet around the child’s slumbering body, lifting her wet tresses away from her face, combing it outwards, soft spokes radiating from a sun. Her fingers rake the pillow. Sleep, baby, whispers Nina to a child who cannot hear her.
This is Margie’s story:
Margie is an only child, Californian to the core. When she was three, her parents moved to Scotland, close to Inverness, where her mother comes from. Her father, a man who made his small fortune in agribusiness, grapes and corn mostly, found Scotland hospitable but the terrain stubbornly resistant to American fertilizers. Her mother never wanted to return, but return they did, and Margie went to school in Sacramento, then to college in Los Angeles, where she’d worked at a rental agency until this move to San Diego. One day she hopes to open a restaurant, not fancy but elegant and simple, the healthful basics with flair – wholegrain watercress sandwiches, lemon-infused granola cupcakes, soy yogurt shakes. Her improbable speciality is makki ki roti with foie gras. Dhaba cuisine meets Chez Panisse.
“That doesn’t sound good,” admits Maggie, embarrassed. “But really, it’s delicious.”
Nina pulls lettuce leaves apart in a capacious salad bowl. Perhaps a leaf could pick up traction, become a magic wand. She could wave it and turn them all into goose liver. Lunch for Marvin.
“Perhaps an upscale cafe by the beach, if we can swing the required capital,” Margie says. “That would be nice.”
Margie has left Siddharth out of the story, saving him for another day. Or perhaps out of diplomacy or politeness. Nina would like to know more, but is careful not to ask. Each to her own unfolding. How simple, thinks Nina, the sheer precision of such details to describe a life. Nothing messy when you chart and tabulate the facts. Here is where I started; here I am now. A ladder on which each rung is hammered soundly, not a slip or creaky slat.
She does not feel any better acquainted with Margie, though.
The details are not luminous. They guard Margie, opaque and hard.
At night the adults sit around the oval kitchen table under a watchful wrought-iron clock that chimes the hour. The television blares a range of noises, full-throated to muted susurrations. An update on a plane lost last week over a war-torn area. A whodunit in process, man or technological failure? Microphones are held up to demand witness. What did you see? How do you feel? Curious faces crowd the screen – aged villagers, eager reporters, even a wide-eyed boy walking a Pekingese. Flashes of objects found. A Minnie Mouse pencil-box, the painted cartoon on the lid still intact after the living are gone. A flapping shirtsleeve, a singed brown suitcase, a woman’s gold-toned black handbag. Wolf Blitzer worries tirelessly in tones to match this visual orchestra. In the background flash a tumbling rush of images; air crashes of yore, a pin-striped suited expert on aviation, a yellow chart with assorted flight data, a general in blue uniform pontificating on the trials of aerial combat, puffs of gray smoke and falling black debris. Such spinning shards of color, a frantic Guernica.
The three of them sit quietly at the table. The first shadows are gathering in the room, the dusk becomes a tender presence. The television is switched off, the world recedes, and now the kitchen is awash with friendly sounds – a blender whirs, a pot bubbles, a singing wisp of steam escapes a kettle. Anyone looking in might think they were a family.
Dinner is wheat bread, salad, a coriander fish stew and apple tart. The food is delicious; Margie is a good cook. All the ingredients, as Nina has suspected, are organic. She cannot eat the salad in its nest of bitter nettles, but Margie has no such queasy hesitation (and neither does Siddharth, who once dismissed all greens as cattle fodder). The rose-red wine decanter is open, fluted glasses stand stiffly by their china dinner plates. Decanters, not bottles, thinks Nina. A sign of a step up and away, into a past of lace tablecloths and turbaned servants in their grandparents’ spacious homes in Bangalore. Long before they knew the ache of waking into mornings in which each moment could be counted like a heartbeat or on fingers without end, without relief of cessation.
Together they sit, waiting, around the table. The clock is moving backwards towards a frozen moment. If they could, they would reach out all at once and still the clock.
The child is still asleep, the chandeliers brightly lit to vaporize the darkness, when Siddharth finally says what Nina has been dreading.
“There is no one there.”
He reaches out to hold her hand, trying to find a way into this conversation, attempting an apology perhaps. Nina pulls away, a gesture unrehearsed and awkward, and he looks askance and drums his fingers lightly. This man has neither the means nor the capacity to speak, or any right to reconvene the unforgiven world. He has a wife called Margie and a house with a swimming pool. He has watched Nina direct and caution the afternoon air; he has exchanged knowing glances with his wife. He has never fended off a German weatherman. He has never traced the landscape of a crumpled pillow. He has borne and lost the sense of falling black debris. And here they are so many years later around a kitchen table in the shadow of a child now dispersed in the wind, light as ash, lost, floating free.
Maya, says Nina sharply, and it is the only time she will speak their daughter’s name. Siddharth is quiet in his chair, Margie stricken.
Seven years now, almost to the day. A child, ten-almost-eleven, rushing downstairs in the morning, waving goodbye from the driveway in her color-sprinkled coat. Watch me go! Count to ten, Mom! Ready, set. . . . Wait, count to hundred! In an instant she’d turn the corner, run up the road, step onto a yellow school bus, See you later, Mom! and the day picks up its daily drumming, beats out its implacable routines. 3 o’clock, a school bus rounds the bend, but it doesn’t stop, not this time. But she was not in school, says the Principal, perplexed. Not to worry, murmur the neighbors, these things rarely happen. Perhaps she’s at a friend’s house. Perhaps at the library. The flurry then, of police and urgent Amber Alerts, of social workers and news reporters. The day freezes, becomes its own mausoleum. And the months, the years, founder in this silent purity of an absence stark as snow.
At this moment, unmoored to any other, Nina sees that Siddharth’s will to speak now is a step toward reprieve. An attempt to recover and let go, as if they were not creatures caught in amber, stilled in their entrancements. To venture every movement as if wagering answers, to let one cross the other out, to nullify and walk away. They will stay in touch – though in truth, they were never very far apart. In the days after their daughter’s disappearance, they were almost lovers once again, until the waiting dried out, fell into a drought redeemed only by despair. But if the earth is forever riven, the years ahead are now turned and ready, damp for planting – if only she will offer benediction and wise counsel, give the word.
Nina gets up from the table and says that she is tired, it’s been a long journey. She walks into the third square bedroom where once a child might lie, her hair a pillow of brown bunting, not a shroud. Nina sees and does not see the sleeping child. There is no one there.
On the night plane back to South Bend, Nina is comforted by her indiscretion: she has stolen the pillow, tucked it in between her shoes and folded underthings. So soft and mushed, it could be a child burrowed in a suitcase.
Black ash is night, or could be rain from blighted planes.
“Overhead bin, ma’am?” says the brightly smiling stewardess. And up it goes.
The Texan in the seat next to her is benign, balding, lush with conversation.
“Trav’lin’ alone?” he inquires, fussing with the arm rest.
It’s not quite a pick‑up line.
The plane steadies for takeoff, the engines build into a rumble. For a moment she’s suspended like a feather between earth and sky, like a cry without provenance or reception. Something rises in her, either grief or laughter. If she holds her breath, she can begin counting, to ten, or to hundred, or forever. Nina looks through the aisle window, but sees nothing but a curve of black. The cabin lights are dimming, and in the darkness she’s grateful not to see herself reflected.
Manini Nayar’s stories have appeared in Chelsea Magazine, Boston Review, The Malahat Review, Stand, and London Magazine, and also broadcast on the BBC World Service.