This story is a feature from our first print anthology, The City.

The day we saw the house was a grim one, wrinkled from too much rain. It hardly ever rained in Chennai, but even so, what I remember is how awash with light the apartment was, as if the sky had twisted a limb, cracking the sun into a dazzling slant. What I remember is that we had never planned to lie to them; that we were whole, noble, and the moment I lied is when the rot appeared, like a small, mouldy dot in the belly of a fruit. 

We had lost count of how many places we had seen. Twenty third’s the charm, Nithin would quip every time we set out to see a new one – the sheer absurdity of the number its own joke – but with every unsuccessful visit, I saw the enthusiasm in his eyes wean, the humour curdling into cold, anxious desperation. Eventually, we stopped saying anything at all before we left. It was enough to hold our hands, our separate palms joined in a singular silent prayer. Let this one be our home.

We were new to the city. “This will be good for us, babe”, I remember saying to him. “You’re getting offers to work on big shows. You can’t keep producing ads here forever, and honestly, you’ll get paid a lot more.” 

“And what about you – your 40,000 followers?” he had asked. Sweet, concerned for all that I had built in Coimbatore, filming recipe after recipe in our tiny kitchen wrecked with tripods and ring lights.

“39,000. And I’ll be fine. Better, even. We can get a nice, aesthetic place. I can get more collaborations, finally hit 50k!”

So we moved, Chennai wide and open to us like a mouth. navigating the hot dog breath of its sun, our shirts dampening at the armpit even as we slipped them on. We had one month to find an apartment. A drop of time, each day hissing as it disappeared, like water on a hot griddle. In the mornings, we thanked our friend’s kindness with quiet smiles before spilling into the metro station, already feeling the wetness at the back of our necks, the smell of jasmine and sweat mingling in the air.

Brokers demanded honesty but were aghast when furnished with the particulars of our lives: unmarried, influencers (practically meaningless; we eventually decided on something vague like ‘media professionals’), drinkers, non-vegetarians. In the initial days, we gushed into the room with the foolish confidence of twenty-somethings, opening with cocksure phrases like “I know what you’re thinking”. We imagined landlords dazzled by this glamorous young couple, assertive and earnest, deeming ourselves meritorious for our radical honesty. 

Nithin was handsome, almost beautiful, but he tempered it with an attentiveness so charming that his beauty was only secondary, a footnote. I had always been puzzled by the phrase ‘carrying oneself’, but the first time I met him, the words illumined themselves to me – this man’s unusual self-assuredness; how he not only carried the weight of his mind and body, but also placed it down with such a gentle ease that you were compelled to do so yourself. Walking into potential apartments, I imagined myself as the perfect foil to him: petite, fierce, a mess of curls that diverted attention from my disproportionately large chest, a genetic kindness that allowed me to be seen as cute, child-like, sensuous at most but never erotic.

I was a food influencer. A new, unique type of woman that had wrangled the cage of a kitchen into a capitalist playground. Not only did I earn, I earned doing what feminists had warned me against. With female friends, I described my work with a sort of clandestine pride – how I had assembled a six-layer chocolate cake for Nithin’s birthday, or the time I caramelized onions for hours, baptizing them in balsamic vinegar and butter until they emerged utterly transformed, the sweet tart jam nothing less than divine sacrament. This was the personality I presented to apartment owners: a beautiful young woman who not only wanted to cook but cooked well, who cooked not just for her partner but for everyone. Day after day, we put on our play to brokers and homeowners, the production not lacking in honesty or talent but misplaced, as if we were performing in a language alien to the audience, so that no matter how much they laughed at the jokes or applauded the acrobatics, the story itself was something they could not understand.

“Is something wrong with us?” Nithin asked me one night, as we were walking back from the station. He sounded lost, his voice drained of its usual confidence. 

“Nothing is wrong with us. We still have more places to look at. This is difficult stuff, babe, we knew that.”

“But it’s not working. Maybe we should tell them we’re married. And this vegetarian thing?  We don’t even get to see half the places.”

I felt hot, the beginning of a fight stirring in me. Nithin barely ate meat. He would eat the biriyani rice, soaked and engorged in the meaty broth, and leave the mutton on my plate.  He would always order the paneer burger except on rare occasions – driven by an insatiable urge he termed ‘cheat day’ – buckets of chicken popcorn from KFC that led to complaints of bloating the next morning. In India, food preference is a long, shimmying thread that bends in odd shapes, too soft, too crinkled to be named – I knew this – but sometimes when I saw him disembowel the shiny yolks of hard-boiled eggs in a paean to health, I was seized by a red-hot rage. I wanted to knot the thread into meaning, name the frayed edges of it for what it really was: disgust.

But what he said wasn’t untrue. There were entire stretches of the metro line we did not even visit. The gorgeous sea-facing apartments by Besant Nagar or the old houses in Mylapore were simply not shown to us for fear of being tainted by some essential non-vegetarianness. I too considered it an inalienable decision. I was cooking everyday,  after all, and the aroma of a good fish moilee or chicken ghee roast was difficult to mask. Their offensiveness would find a neighbour’s nose quicker than it found us. My anger softened into something delicate, spreadable like butter. Guilt. I felt responsible.

“Maybe we should do this on our own,” I said. “There are all these places in the newspaper, let’s just fuck the brokers. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

Nithin was quiet. We were approaching our makeshift home – the pull-out couch in K’s place – where we had idled for the last two months. K was generous, willing us to stay as long as it took, but we could sense small thorns in her voice sometimes, barely visible in the light but palpable, like the pinpricks of stubble on a teenage boy. We had already overstayed our welcome, watched the niceties of “No, you’re the guests, I’ll clean up!” evaporate into wispy complacence: K piling dishes in the sink, or ordering cash on delivery items that she mysteriously wasn’t home to pay for. We had to leave soon.

As we ascended the stairs, the air was dull and overripe as if before  rain, giant clouds gathering over us. Nithin said, “Let’s look at some newspaper listings tonight.” 

It was the sparsest ad in all of Adyar Times: precise, pure muscle and bone in a newspaper dribbling with fat. ‘1800 sq. ft, fully furnished 3BHK in Thiruvanmiyur, Rs. 30,000. Ready to move.’ Nithin was immediately skeptical, launching into a tirade lined with worn platitudes. No free lunch, too good to be true etcetera. I snapped back with a series of mine. Early bird, every dog. In the end, with the knowing smile of men that concede defeat to the women they love, he saved their contact number on his phone.

We rehearsed our play, making minor alterations to the original script; our eccentricities manicured to present a perfect couple with minor flaws. Engaged, not married. Social drinkers. Eggetarians. Small towners in a big city (which meant we had both ambition and roots). We remained ‘media people’ but worked in companies, the golden arches of a legitimate corporate structure, a halo of light. It was raining that day, and as we sat at the station rehearsing the story of our lives, it was as if we were backstage, the dull distant drone of rain like the murmur of an anticipant audience. 

The Subramaniams referred to themselves as ‘simple’. They had a large bristly ‘WELCOME’ mat at the entrance (all caps) and a laminated print of Goddess Lakshmi luxuriating on a pile of gold. I had seen these often in Chennai – the unvanquished lords of tear-off calendars – that clung to the walls long after the year had been incrementally ripped out, their watchful gaze ever surveying the passage of time. Our shoes were wet and squeaky, and we apologized as our feet left wet imprints on the marble floor.

Ashok Subramaniam was a soft, old man. He was not unfit, barring a slightly rounder waist, but possessed the gait of a fat man, his movements a tad slow, unsure. When we walked in, he said “Welcome to our humble abode” in an unconvinced read-aloud voice, like a poor imitation of a wall decal. A muted welcome, all lowercase. The first thing I noticed was how much light the apartment held despite the rain, as if it was coming from within the walls, a radiator of light built in. The sky was albumen, the yolk of sun dropped here. Ashok led us to the sofa. His wife seemed younger; her hair coiffed into a bob that was beginning to grow out. It was an unsuitable haircut for Chennai weather, and it made me happy that it was raining today, the hair touching her nape in a cool, dry kiss. I smiled at her.

“Would you like to look around?” she asked, which took us by surprise. It was a generosity we hadn’t been extended so far. The routine typically involved a rigorous interview disguised as pleasant conversation. ‘Where did you say you worked?’ or ‘When did you get married?’ were standard icebreakers, questions that could have easily been framed closed ended, their anxious upward lilt sharp as a knife to the throat. I squeezed Nithin’s hand. Early bird, every dog.

“We’d love to.” 

The apartment was on the first floor of an old construction, one of the last few that hadn’t been seduced by the glamour of a joint venture. Each room had its own balcony, the biggest one in the living room overlooking a small personal plot of land where Ashok said we could grow our own vegetables. The kitchen stretched long and limber as a cat, and inside it, the whole works: a washing machine, microwave, a refrigerator with a moisturized glow. I felt dizzy, my joy a bit ridiculous and uncontained, like a woman in a TV commercial. The furniture in the living room had an old-world charm, chipped and distressed with an appropriate antique aesthetic that modern cafes spent foolish money recreating. Every room had an ensuite bathroom that smelled faintly of sambrani and soap; spotless. “This is too good to be true”, I whispered to Nithin.

Outside, the rain had slowed to a pitter patter. We sat down on the sofa as if on cue, prepared to launch into the carefully combed chronicle of our lives, but before we could begin, Ashok cut in. His voice was deep, grainy. “See, we are simple people.” he said. “We don’t care what you do, or where you go. We only wish that you respect this house and pay the rent on time.”  

It was the closest I’d had to an out of body experience. I looked at Nithin and I could see it in him too, euphoric, his soul floating up to meet mine. 

“This is Leela’s home” he continued. “She grew up here. And now that her mother has passed... well, it's our responsibility.” Leela nodded. We nodded too, perhaps a touch too vigorously. “We live in Bangalore; we no longer have any connections to this city, this... house. There are three other apartments in this building, and they have all vacated. It is an old one, you know. Nowadays everybody is running after modern things.” 

Modern? What could be more modern than this, I thought. A house untainted by neighbours. Their stabbing eyes, opinions with sharp edges. When I was in college, I remember being tagged in an innocent Facebook photo. I am thin, my perfectly slender Jesuit body sculpted by the holy trinity of stress, adolescence, and a diet of chips and sporadic mess meals. My fingers curve out half a heart. Next to me, a dark, bony hand completes it – the cultural secretary of my college, an unremarkable boy haloed to the status of a ‘legend’ (he drank thirteen beers and peed in a bush). The photo is the coolest thing I have achieved in college so far and exactly 36 hours later, I take it down. One of my neighbours had made an impassioned call to my mother, expounding the moral pitfalls of her ‘modern’ daughter. I blocked all my neighbours that day. Ashok said ‘modern’ in the same self-virtuous tone Kala Aunty had used that day, and I felt pleased to meet him on his own terms, all the while a surreptitious thrill inside me, as if I had deceived him. 

“We don’t mind the construction at all, sir. It is very charming.” 

“Good, very good.” he said, looking away. “I will be frank, I like you. You are young. You will enjoy this house as Leela and her siblings did. Maybe start a family.” He said this to Nithin, his tone pleasant and avuncular, the way men sometimes have secret conversations in the presence of women. I could imagine them drinking their whiskeys neat in the living room, the alcohol turning them garrulous, and I felt an odd pang. A seesaw of comfort and betrayal. 

“We do not have any conditions. Except one.” he said. “You are vegetarians, right?” 

A beat. Drizzle and birdsong in the air. In the street across, a man was selling oranges – a kilo for fifty rupees. In a movie or a play, the audience would have easily understood a pause like that, the characters shifting mildly in their seats, their eyes flitting once between each other, barely perceptible like the twitch on a cat’s whisker.  But regardless of how we had scripted this scene, arranging our flaws in the most amenable order, this was real life. There was no camera zooming in to reveal the particulars of the moment: the sweat on my upper lip on an unusually cool day, the way I jumped up to answer, the eagerness a second too late to be truly inconspicuous. My hungry, desirous mouth and the way it said, Yes, yes.

Ashok pursed his lips, eyes darting to my partner once again, as if to say no matter what I contributed, the real conversation was still between them. 

“Yes, of course.” Nithin croaked. He did not look at me. 

“Excellent. Then we shouldn’t have any problems.” Ashok smirked, and I suddenly felt uneasy. How smooth, how quick it all was. Is that it?

“If you have no issues, we can sign the agreement now. Leela and I would like to leave as soon as possible.”

Ideally, we would have gone back to K’s place and had a conversation before we decided, but there was something about that house, something urgent and inexorable that tugged at us, and perhaps there was something to say about our despair too, its bright, naked yearning that resisted no pull. Before we knew it, it was done. We paid a sizable chunk of our savings as the deposit; but we’d found our dream home, and that too, for a fraction of the price we had imagined paying. 

After we signed the contract, Leela Subramaniam offered us weak tea. It smelled of milk that was beginning to sour. The rain had evaporated without a trace and Chennai was Chennai again, the sun restored to its place in the high skies, reflecting in our teacups like coins of gold. I regarded the teacup warily and somewhere in the house, I heard a sound. It was not domestic, like a drain or a leaky tap, but something intimate; a wet, slick sound lodged deep inside the walls. We sipped at the tea, and my stomach churned. 

On the metro ride back to Saidapet, I told Nithin, “So, this is our last ride, huh?”

“I guess we got lucky.”

“Do you think it’s going to be okay?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

I was silent. My stomach, still churning. 

“I lied.” 

Nithin laughed. “Babe. We don’t even have any neighbours. What are you worried about? It's going to be fine. Better than fine. It’s going to be amazing, early bird.” he said, kissing my cheek. 

But as we walked out of the station, gorged on the promise of a sunlit slice of home, its balconies ripe and juicy with light, I felt a strange sickness, as if I had eaten something forbidden too fast and in secret, my stomach so fearfully large that at any given point of time, I could simply burst, the evidence of my meal oozing from the navel in a slow, mournful trickle.

The day we moved, I boiled milk in the kitchen until it spilled over. Neither of us were particularly religious (my mother preferred the term ‘god-fearing’; and we definitely feared god, just not enough to incite worship) but there was still comfort in ritual, in signs. Watching the milk in the saucepan, its gentle swell like a sail, I experienced a grown-up joy, an assurance that my life was finally starting, the vessel of it moving in the right direction.

I decided I would make payasam. My mother’s palada prathaman. Typical Instagram recipes will instruct you to use condensed milk, but nothing compares to the lazy churn of milk reducing in the pot, the sublime marriage of fats and sugars officiated by cardamom. The palada, thin dried shreds of rice flour, should be soft but retain a bite. You finish with a ghee-soaked frenzy of cashew nuts and raisins. I set up my tripod in different angles, figuring how best to hard launch my new space.

The eye of the camera is hard, unblinking. It can reveal things that you had hitherto ignored, had not wanted to see. This was what I loved. If the rice in your biriyani was overcooked, or the meat too tough, the camera would tell. It was not an aesthetic, it was truth. I set up the saucepan on the stove and caramelized the sugar, watching the transparent crystals melt into a deep, sensuous brown. When it began to stick, the caramel sizzling like hot tar, I poured the milk and the boiled palada. A column of steam rose up to fog the viewfinder. That was when I saw it. On the camera; the truth of its bleary eye. Like a petri dish through a microscope.

The rice flakes were moving – not the violent squirm of rice as it balloons with water – this was a movement charged, intentional, something so deeply primal about it that I jumped. I zoomed into the image on the screen, but it was unmistakable, the palada writhing like tiny larvae, their insides growing fat and putrid with pus. Was I okay? I checked the expiry date. Eighteen months away. Yet, there it was. My saucepan brimming with these lithe, dreadful things, alive, soaking up the milk like a hungry child. Were they getting bigger? I wanted to call out to Nithin, my truth-teller, my friend, but what was more objective than the truth of footage; the omniscient eye of the iPhone? I checked the shots again and again, studying the surface of the pale pink porridge. The liquid slowly separating, the white leeched from the milk. The colour of Leela Subramaniam’s weak tea. Sour. Stomach-churning. I opened the dustbin, fishing out the plastic pouches of Aavin milk: expired last week. I laughed. I am crazy. I need to sit. The marble on the kitchen sill was cold. I rested my head against it. On the stove, the pot bubbled thoughtlessly, the eye of a raisin floating up to greet me with a moist wink. 

The fridge smelled. No matter how much I cleaned, the odour remained, deep in its walls like seepage. An intestinal smell. Rotten. Its incontinent drip of rancid water, like urine. I wanted nothing to do with it. In the evenings when Nithin was home, I led him to the refrigerator, urging him to breathe it in, his face in the mouth of an arctic beast. In the first weeks he laughed. This is as fresh as a daisy, he said, patting my head. I must have seemed adorable to him, my insistence the fastidiousness of a new bride, but as it continued, I could sense a growing concern, the frustration and exhaustion in his voice befitting as it was to a worn wife, Babe, this is weird. You have to stop. 

But it wasn’t fresh as a daisy. It was a rank mouth, and I knew there was a sickness inside that it neither swallowed nor spat, something irretrievably lodged, feathery and blooming like a tonsil stone. I rinsed it, every day a different cocktail of chemicals gargling its throat. Detergent, soap, vinegar. When nothing worked, I booked an electrician with a 4.5 rating on a mobile app. He studied the refrigerator for hours, tapping and prodding as if it were an exotic animal to be coaxed out of its ennui, only to conclude that it was in perfect condition. “Hi-fi fridge, nga” he said, annoyed by my disapproval of it; and from the timbre of his voice, I knew he thought me a rich, spoiled girl, ungrateful for my big house crammed with hi-fi appliances, ignorant of my own privilege. I rated him 1 on the app. 

Tending to the fridge sucked at my time like a hard sweet. I needed a routine. In the mornings, I brushed its mouth with a soft scrub of baking soda and vinegar which I let sit for two hours. I then applied a coat of heady essential oils that marinated all afternoon, and finally left it open, letting it air itself, the ferment of its cold bowel. With no place to store our food, I was cooking less, buying groceries daily. In the city, everything came home in ten minutes. We no longer had to do our shopping in the store, which I missed. Holding up a coconut to the ear and shaking it for water. Examining the underside of a spinach leaf. Buying mutton at the butcher’s, the meat hot and beating as it hits the plastic bag. But we did not have a vehicle, and the thought of walking or bargaining with auto drivers in the heat was paralyzing. In time, I grew to enjoy the ease of it all, coddled into convenience by individually wrapped bell peppers and perfect, pre-marinated cuts of meat in shiny clingwrap. I found myself smoking freely, ordering 20-pack cigarettes void of the gendered horror of the purchase. On days I felt particularly adventurous, I sat in front of the refrigerator blowing smoke into it like a stoned college boy, amusing myself with this trickery of saging. I had graduated from a new bride, my days now whole with caring, cleaning, nursing, and inside me, I felt the stirrings of something tender, motherly. 

You’re not cooking much these days, Nithin told me one day, but I could tell from the way he regarded me like a delicate animal, that this was a question. I’m doing a summer salads series, I said. We ate salads for the rest of the week and though it was healthy, the kind of food that fit squarely in his diet, he regarded me with a suspicious smile, the way I spent hours loitering around the fridge, washing its feet like a pious devotee. 

Nithin had just landed a job as a showrunner for a notorious reality television show where twenty inmates were locked in an isolated house for 150 days. They had no contact with the outside world, no constant scroll of technology to ease their days. The camera clocked every minute religiously, an Orwellian presence that disciplined their movements, assessed their truths. What a privilege, I thought, to be seen, to be known like that, every minute of your life made meaningful by its consumption; and when in pain, sorrow gestating in your belly like something only you could see, to take your companion’s hand, place it upon your stomach and ask, Do you feel that too? and have them say, Yes, yes.

I don’t know when I started hearing it, but once it came, The Noise was everywhere; a low, liquid gurgling. When I cleaned the fridge, I felt I was drowning, taken into the ground in a whirlpool of sound. I heard it seeping from the pots and pans, the microwave, the washing machine, the dry hum of machines suddenly turned slippery. I knew it was the fridge. It was not enough to offend me with its odour, the hours steadily hollowed out of my being; now it wanted to display its ugly, quivering lip, begging for attention like a petulant child. I wanted to smack it. That dumb sound. A constant gurgling, deep and watery like a hungry stomach.

The Noise was sneaky, it liked playing games. When Nithin was around – which he barely was – it never appeared, and when it did, presented itself only to me like a loyal girlfriend. Don’t you hear it? I would ask over and over, until it felt like my mind was unraveling. Nithin suggested I meditate for ten minutes every day. I sat in the balcony, away from the refrigerator, as far away from The Noise as possible, kneading my brain into silence, but it was the kind of constant howling I could not ignore. Helpless, hungry. If only I could carry it in my arms until it fell asleep, nurse it on my sore breast. Some nights I woke in a cold panic, rushing to the kitchen to hold it, but as days passed, I felt the sound getting closer and closer until it was inside me, a child birthed and returned to my womb, as if I had spent weeks trying to suck its poison and ended up swallowing it whole. It took so much from me. That agonizing wail, sating its stomach by gnawing at mine, so relentless its acid hunger, that I felt the need to crawl out of my own mouth, pink and ruddy and skinless, a terrible fish rising from the sea.

We had no neighbours. Two houses on every floor, two floors, and I was alone. A lonely ship on rough waters. On days when The Noise was too ugly to bear, I found myself sitting by the door, eyes transfixed on the corridor willing someone to appear, to lift me up by my face and say, This is real. This is happening. Goddess Lakshmi was still on my doorway. When I paced the corridor, my mind and body heavy as if it needed shedding, her Mona Lisa eyes followed me everywhere, a mischievous glint in them like she would tell on me. I did not dare remove her from the wall but avoided that gaze – eternal, unflinching, and thought to myself, my mother would be so proud. How perfectly god-fearing I had become.

I couldn’t keep anything down. The Noise in my brain, the nausea, inside then outside, like a demon that delivered and devoured their children all day. My body, shrinking. My pants loosening around the waist. One evening, Nithin brought home a plate of chilli beef from my favourite restaurant. A little surprise in a plastic crinkle, the bottom of the newspaper translucent with grease. I ate it straight from the bag breathless; my hungry, desirous mouth, the yes dropping from its sides like blood from a fresh wound. When I threw up, the vomit swirled into the drain in a pale brown hue. Sour. Stomach-churning. The colour of Leela Subramaniam’s weak tea. 

That night, I scrubbed the freezer raw, the sound of it harsh and metallic and one with The Noise: Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat: A baptism, the purity of ritual washing over me. I sniffed my fingers – the smell of soap – and when I returned to bed, I felt fresh, rejuvenated, as if I had taken a loofah to my brain, the light airy lather clouding its vision. I slept like a dog that night.

New rituals offered new comforts. A Turkish hamam in my very home. I barely slept, visiting the fridge in the dead of night, the green dots of my eyes like digits on an alarm clock. The more I scrubbed, the more I heard the raucous laughter of the fridge as if I were tickling its feet, The Noise giggling in a sweet effervescence. Clean and healthy; a liquid music rising every day like an orchestral score. I scrubbed harder and harder and harder every day until I was exciting myself, my wrist weary from the quickness and throbbing with pain, but I had never felt so ecstatic before, I had never felt so pure and divine, my eyes rolled back in dreamy rapture, my forehead beaded with sweat; something dark and erotic awakening in me. 

One night, Nithin walked out of the bedroom and saw me crouched by the fridge, my hands rubbing the surface in rough, grating shrills, my hair a tumbling afterthought, and I saw his face knot into something hard, terrible. I laughed. My laughter louder than anything I had heard before, louder than The Noise, crashing outside of me like a torrential flood. YOU CUCKOLD, I screamed, WHO’S THE EARLY BIRD NOW? and I enjoyed myself, my hands in a pornographic jerk, vulgar, sloppy, watching his stupid mouth curl into disgust, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, until I was not sure where the blood was coming from, red raw drops squirting on the floor like semen. I studied the floor like a plate. Little pearls of pomegranate on a plate of curd rice. A white flag and a red flag. A truce and a warning. A liquid feast. I didn’t remember the last time I ate. 

I licked my plate clean. 

Nithin said we would get rid of the fridge. This needs to stop. I’ll speak to Ashok and reimburse him, but we can’t go on like this. There was an air of finality in his voice, and I could tell that this was not a gift wrapped in love or appeasement. It was quiet, stern, something like hush money. I don’t think we can afford it, I told him in a small voice, and he showed me the cheque of his first salary, the zeroes bubbling at the end like a frothy filter coffee. Had it been a month already?

My heart curled into a hot fist. I had begun to care for it, like a pet you didn’t want but grow to love; its quiet purring, its faint wet smell. The Noise synced up to my heart’s beating, which I was afraid to hear on its own again. This is my baby, I said. This is my love. We share the same blood. He slapped me. A white flag and a red flag. A truce and a warning.

I requested a dignified death. We would not put it up for sale or dissect its innards into spare parts. It would go as it was – whole, immeasurable, brimming with music. I did not want to see it happen, but on Sunday morning, sitting in the balcony with my coffee, I heard him heave it out of the house like a giant corpse, its plastic ribs rattling along the staircase, the icy teeth chattering in the sun. 

The new refrigerator is clean, lobotomized. We keep everything in it. There is a ritual to our lives, an orderliness, now that The Noise is within me, its voice soothing, buoyant. When we place our orders on the phone, it makes little gurgles of approval or annoyance, and I beam the entire time, like a new mother besotted with her child. The Subramaniams call us once a month to check up on the house, and we answer greedily, the house is beautiful, the house is joyful, it is like a home that we have always lived in, two early birds in a humble abode. You eat like one now, Nithin says, a little bird pecking at the plate, and it is true. My appetite is small, as if I have sated myself with water and left little space for food; my belly ballooned like a body washed ashore. 

Some evenings, I eat nothing. Instead, I stare at the refrigerator in the plot below, its top door snatched open in a stiff embrace, and I think, is that my body, my own rigid hands and empty skull half buried in the dirt; and The Noise crashes inside me like a great wave. Everything is wrong for a second. I feel a startling chill, and the camera pulls back to reveal the actor carrying the coffin at their own funeral, my own blatant naivete flashing embarrassed in the eyes of the mourners. 

I no longer eat meat. I walk past the biriyani shop in the beach, the air thick with the fatty haze of beef and mutton, and my stomach tightens, its insides an electric wrangle of wires. On Instagram, I announce my vegetarianism in a text-only post like I have acquired a new religion. My body is my temple, I say. I lose a quarter of my followers. But I am building a new life, minting my social currency from scratch, and how futile it all is anyway, that hamster wheel of validation. I cook more than ever now, the new fridge an abundance of fresh vegetables and fruit. Both Nithin and I agree, we are healthier, happier. I am awash with light, and my body has a lustrous gleam to it, as if it were shined. 

This story is excerpted from Hammock's first print anthology, 'The City', available to purchase here.