The home and hearth assume many forms, and among those who spend their lives trying to wholly belong to a place, not too many deny that their genesis is often a form of both art and fulfillment. And for those who might disagree, I most certainly prescribe a session with my parents, who only two years ago, poured both their hearts and savings into building ours as frugally and decadently as possible. Among those who don’t have the courage for such denial, some go to the extent of drawing parallels of such acts to the near divinity of childbirth. And despite my qualms with God, perhaps I too am one of them. But I don’t speak of this in the architectural sense.
I barely have a clue about all that goes into building a house, and judging by the thinness of my wallet, I certainly am in no position to call myself a patron of the craft. Neither am I the seventeen-year-old Meeraj, with his biceps carved from dark brown marble, laying brick with ease as if he were cutting birthday cakes. The first time that I saw the boy, he had smiled, while I tumbled out from the back of my father’s car—a copy of Tuesdays with Morrie held awkwardly in my hand. He was lean, but also unsurprisingly well built. He could knock me out with a single blow if he’d ever wanted. You could almost immediately see the drying boyhood in the crevices of his dust smothered face when he smiled. He was younger; much younger to me. Still, the near absence of fat in his genji clad, lungi wrapped body, and the pungent biri that hung from his lips ensured that these crevices painted the rest of his face with an unwarranted coat of adulthood. As Papa’s shadow loomed onto me from behind, and then passed me by, I watched him leap away from his makeshift bed—an old, rat-eaten sofa that sometimes moonlighted as a throne for my parents in this dusty patch of concrete that was then slowly blooming into our King’s Cottage.
King’s Cottage, as it stands today, is certainly not a cottage. To call it a palace fit for royalty too would be an exaggeration. At best, it has offered each of us one or two regal luxuries. For me, it was a separate room to store and read my books— my library, the lighting in which I still remain a little disappointed with. Mummum—my mother—picked out a bathtub that she barely ever uses now, and with it, some white marble for the Thakur Ghor in which she makes her presence felt at least once a day. Papa—not quite the exhibitionist, unlike the rest of us—settled for a small study, and citing the exigencies of a world hit by Covid-19, picked out some pastel colored blinds as a decent background for his Zoom Meetings. And for Dadun, my recently deceased grandfather, it was perhaps the pleasure of breathing his last breath in a home that he could call his own.
One of the strangest things about humankind remains that despite ceaselessly pining for liberty and freedom at every twist and turn that it has taken in its long-drawn history, what it still pines for the most intensely, is to be anchored to a home within that freedom: a roof over one’s head; a piece of land on which they can walk barefoot without fear; four walls to keep the wind at bay. Unlike Meeraj, after years of only tending to my pot belly, and licking ink off of the many books that I inherited from Dadun even when he himself was only a middle aged man, and the many more that I had emptied my own pockets into, I had only begun having such realizations at twenty-three. “What is home?” was never a question that I had pondered over in my youth, let alone my childhood. I had heard of a home that Dadun said Nehru and Jinnah had robbed us of, when they had split the nation between them with corporate efficiency. I had seen the brick colored walls of the Assam-type house that he and Dadima, my Grandmother, had built in Guwahati, only to hand it over to some man who was eagerly investing in real estate, and move to Kolkata where the Bengalis were aplenty. I had also spent a few summers in their two-bedroomed flat in a building that loomed over the local CPM office in Park Circus, before which stood a crumbling bust that somewhat resembled Marx. There, Dadima had spent her last days often bursting into tears as she pined for simpler people and her Guwahati, as loudspeakers would pop up around the crumbling, sleepy Marx with no prior notice, and the famous Calcutta wisdom would bang against her windows at the unholiest of hours.
Perhaps the closest I had ever come to calling a place my own home had ironically never belonged to any of us. For most parts of my life, I had lived in the oft-changing lodgings that would be allotted to my parents back in the neighboring hill state of Meghalaya, on account of their employment in a school campus where the pines grew tall, and the skies were always a gentle shade of gray. Carved out of Assam in the 70s, Meghalaya—“the abode of clouds” —was named by some Bengali gentleman, who took a liking to its rapport with the rains. And if it could be an abode for clouds, why indeed could it not be mine? And so I had never really worried myself with such trivial things, busying myself with my books, and a woman I was madly in love with then. It was only after I came to Guwahati to attend college, and when my parents eventually decided to return as well, did we begin to feel the palpable absence of a permanent home. With both Dadima and the Communists gone by then, Dadun too had gotten weary of what he said was “every Calcuttan’s need to assert their intellect loudly”. And so he had sold the flat as impulsively as he had bought it, and had rushed back to wherever his son was. And as the family reunited in Guwahati, talks of finding land and building a house quickly became a recurring subject at the dinner table. Looking back, I don’t think anyone in this odd bunch of people could ever really find the freedom that I was talking about, but we ultimately found and anchored ourselves to a home in King’s Cottage.
My parents had settled on this name that smacks of a colonial hangover for reasons that are rather abstract. Aside from their wish to feel like royalty for once within this “sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic”, it was also perhaps a futile attempt to latch onto the many years we spent working, studying and taking root in the school campus. I, for one, had not known any other place so closely since I was born in a nearby hospital. My parents too, had arrived there early in their twenties. For Dadun—the poet who spent his summers with us, and had a strict habit of waking up at four every morning—the pine trees and the frost covered grass would cyclically be sources for nourishment and fatigue. Pinned on the outskirts of Meghalaya’s sleepy little capital Shillong, this was a place where cottages never seemed out of place. In fact, it was a place where cottages and palaces were sometimes synonymous. The baptism of our new—and this time, hopefully permanent home—thus drew inspiration from a curious structure near Nongkrem, the Khasi village at the heart of which the Indian Military had built our school. This structure, the palace of the titular King of Nongkrem, is a traditional wooden cottage tucked away within abundant pine trees. Thick locks of hay form its drooping, dog-eared roof, and from what my father tells me, it is an architectural wonder; built without the use of any metal nails to keep the frame in place.
The home that Meeraj and his comrades were building for us, however, had no real semblance to the palace. Neither did my father resemble the monarch in question. To begin with, ours was a concrete “RCC” structure —one among the many that continue to burst out of the quickly dwindling land in the restless city of Guwahati despite stern warnings from seismologists.
Although Meeraj had quickly sprung away from the throne at my father’s sight that day, Papa had paid it no heed, marching hurriedly past the boy, and towards the narrow case of stairs looking for Zohirul Da. The commander and the only certainty, among this ever-changing cast of young men, Zohirul Da, is as old as I am, and yet I could never muster the courage to call him anything other than Da. Married, and expecting his second child, Zohirul Da was the only one who spoke his Bangla without any hesitation, unlike his boys who seemed to have given in to the strange demands of Assam’s linguistic politics. Much to my father’s amusement, they only spoke to us in what ended up being a comically broken Assamese, disregarding my attempts at tapping into Mummum’s “Kortasi Khaitasi” for the sake of conversation.
Seeing my father’s disinterest in the empty sofa, I had pounced onto it and had spread the book in my hands open. But barely half a page later, Mummum had tumbled in with the many bags that she seemed to carry wherever she went—her eyes fixed on it as she warded me off as if I were some mischievous spirit. My mother teaches children; she has, for many years now. And so when her eyes fell upon Meeraj, she immediately sensed that he was a child.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” She asked, her eyebrows stitched together with a passive curiosity. The quest for King’s Cottage had only recently resumed, after the almost two year-long Covid hiatus that had sent Zohirul Da and his crew scrambling back to their villages in Dhubri and Goalpara. After having their lives turned upside down, some had not returned, and had to be replaced with new sets of hands that were just as good at laying bricks as if they were cutting birthday cakes. Had they died? I wondered. But Papa had chuckled when I had asked him, and had flung towards me some news report that claimed that the nation’s working class had fostered a ridiculously strong immunity against the disease, thanks to its consistent exposure to filth and illness. They were doing just fine.
Meeraj broke into another smile upon my mother’s interrogation.
“Haw Didi“
“You look like a child… How old are you?” Mummum continued
“I’m eighteen” was the practiced, confident response. Mummum laughed the way she often used to in her classroom back in Shillong. A laughter I rarely hear these days.
“Cheeky liar. Why are you not in school, studying?”
“I don’t like studying. I like to work.” Meeraj said with childish arrogance in his voice, as if he had figured out all of life’s mysteries even at this age. Meeraj too, like Zohirul Da, spoke in Bangla; but I could sense that that was because he was still a child, and hadn’t yet felt the air thickened with ink that lingered all around him. Standing witness to this exchange between the woman who had given birth to me and the child who was giving life to my home, my plan to wrap up Tuesdays with Morrie was quickly forgotten. Meeraj, as it turned out, was Zohirul Da’s nephew, and the two lived a few homes away from each other in their village in Dhubri. He had a mother at home, and two sisters, both of whom were older to him. His father had died a young man, and from what I could gather, ever since then, all that Meeraj had aspired for, was to bring to his family—as the juvenile but only “man” of their house—was some sense of wellbeing and stability. It wasn’t too difficult to understand why he liked to work, and neither was it difficult to understand that he had never known another choice.
Speaking of houses, he mumbled about how the hut where he had spent his childhood had only recently made way for a pucca brick and mortar house because of government philanthropy. I felt my mother’s clutch seek out and tighten around the blue handbag where she carries the money on which the family runs, and her eyes rolled at what he told her. “The middle class is the one that always suffers. There are no welfare schemes for us”, she chuckled—perhaps the face of the rose cheeked bank manager who had graciously granted us our home loan had flashed before her eyes. By then Zohirul Da and Papa had both come back downstairs, and Mummum broadened her field of investigation by posing more questions. “We had asked him to stay in school. His mother kept telling him she can manage.” Zohirul Da had chuckled. “But he keeps failing, and has no interest in studies anyway. He’s only up to mischief back in the village, and keeps telling me he wants to work. So I brought him with me this time.”. Zohirul Da had only recently promoted himself from a daily wage laborer to a small-time thikadar—a contractor. In fact, ours was his second project, and as such he had to tap into whatever frugal means he could come across to make a profit. Meeraj blushed at the accusations, and melted away into the evening’s darkness that had by then engulfed everything.
….
The next time I saw Meeraj had been an eventful day, picked out and chosen with much strategy, while keeping with the seasons, Gods and expenses. I had been woken up and ordered to shower early in the morning, while a feast of chicken and rice had been readied for not just Zohirul Da’s forces, but for almost a dozen more daily wage laborers who had been employed for the rigorous work that the day had in store. A coconut had been smashed, and my forehead smothered with an oily mix of ash and vermillion. The building’s roof was to be casted with concrete that day—a thick, flat-lined, crown for the house itself, which the process demanded, be casted without fail in a single day, and which, in no way resembled the hay roofed palace in Nongkrem. Both Bangla, and painstakingly taken efforts towards Assamese, were being flung around in the crowd, and in the hurried fluency of this hybrid tongue, I found it difficult to clutch at both during some moments, while during others, I understood everything perfectly. The crowd had come alive on its own—a star cast of men, women, and of course, a child—an independent, automated enterprise that knew clearly that the genesis of a house is an art. Checkered lungis and cotton sarees, from which many colors burst, fluttered as parts of the enterprise marched up and down the narrow stairs with cement filled pans on their heads, while the others fed the hungry and tantrum-throwing mixer the correct proportions of water, grit and cement. Some cleaned and cleared the way, while others swept and dusted, as the streaks of smoke rose up from biris being passed around. One of the jollier amongst the middle-aged men dallied poetically with the women while they worked, humming and mispronouncing his way through old Hindi film numbers like “Sanson Ki Zaroorat Hai Jaise” while frolicking up and down the staircase. The women too replied with soft and unanimous cackles as they stuffed tamul into his hands a few times. Standing on the topmost stair, from where a wooden plank led up to the slowly forming roof, one could see the mixture was being poured onto the cast that had been prepared by Zohirul Da and his men over the last week or two. They poured, and flattened, and then poured some more.
Within this tremendously efficient operation, Meeraj had been given one of the ‘easier’ tasks— carrying sacks of cement to where the mixer had strategically been placed to minimize manual labor. I noticed that he initially struggled with their weight, but remained unmoved. He smacked and ran his hands over a few of the sacks to get an idea of how much they weighed, before lifting them up with force that he drew from his thigh,as if he were disposing of a corpse. Despite the many layers of cement that had covered it—and had covered the pair of trousers and the striped shirt that he was wearing—the childhood today was especially apparent on his face, as he flung around the sacks like he was in a toy store, nicking dwindling biris from his colleagues intermittently. The older men scolded him once or twice, but not much was going to affect him today. After all, he too was a man now.
It was evening, by the time that lunch was served, for Zohirul Da had warned us that it was in no way possible to halt the process for a lunch-break, lest we wanted to put the long term structural integrity of the house at risk. And once the last speck of the mixture had been poured in, a collective prayer for blinding, burning sunlight to grace the already sweltering city for the next four days that escaped each of our lips. No one could displease the gods now. Otherwise, the rain would come and wash away all the work that Meeraj and his comrades put in, and the bank manager would perhaps put my parents and I to death.
With no way to heat up the food that had been brought from yet another temporary accommodation where we were then residing—a two bedroomed flat resting on the northern outskirts of the hurriedly expanding Guwahati—the chicken and rice had been served cold. But the men and women hadn’t protested; some of their eyes had expressed contentment at the sight of the packets-full of salt and green chillies, and the few tongue burning bhut jolokias that had been arranged for them for an exceptional gastronomic experience. Water from the recently installed bore-well gushed through the two kathas of our land, as hands and feet and cement covered faces were washed, and then washed again. Not much could be done about the light gray color that had seized upon the arbitrarily combined vests, shirts, trousers and lungis, and the sarees that differed only in matters of patterns and color. Handing out flimsy green paper plates and plastic glasses, Papa had generously ordered me to go grab as many bottles of Thumbs Up as were needed to quench everyone’s thirst. When the feast was done, and the mosquitoes that rose precisely at the brink of every evening in Guwahati had bothered everyone too much already, and of course, once the payments had been drawn out of my mother’s blue handbag and handed over to the heads of each crew, the crowd began to disperse quickly, and from it precipitated Zohirul Da and his men. Meeraj looked fulfilled, and would certainly convince himself that he had become a man if he looked in the mirror that night. And yet he remained a child.
“The little one worked the most today.” My mother joked as she loosened her grip on the now empty bag. Papa laughed too, and Meeraj’s face— now having been cleaned by cold water from the earth—blushed through the dark of his skin like that of a young poet, who had set his eyes on his beloved for the first time. “Deadly fellow, this one …”, Papa continued “…Works like a machine. But why didn’t you finish school?” Both my parents earned their livelihoods from working with children in schools, and so perhaps this was a question that neither could ever contain themselves from asking.
“What will I do in school Dada? I like working. Porashuna korte bhalo lage na”
“He’s heading to Gujarat soon” someone in the now flimsy crowd sniggered, and the boy crumpled up coyly.
“Why, what’s in Gujarat?”
“The factories there pay good money. My cousin works there. He has asked me to come” He said, even more shyly now, but with certainty; his confidence bolstered by his role in an event as important as building the King’s Cottage.
For a moment, Shah Rukh Khan, with his metal framed glasses, flashed before my eyes, mumbling “Gujarat ke hawa me vyaapar hai Saaheb. In Gujarat, there is business in the air” to a disappointed Nawazuddin Siddique in some film whose name I couldn’t remember.
“Accha Achha”, Papa mumbled, as we headed to the car.
Before we drove northwards through the Saraighat, and towards our dwindling days in Papa’s quarters, I asked my parents if we could have some biryani for dinner. Papa protested, and we finally settled on butter chicken and naan instead.
…
The last time that I had seen Meeraj was two days before Eid, as Zohirul Da and his comrades had gathered before my parents for their Bokshish, their bonuses. Papa had smiled and nudged his head towards Mummum, pretending as if he had no control over the blue family purse. “Ask your Didi. Taka Poisha is not my department.”, he said, rising from his seat and lighting up a cigarette. As Mummum handed out a few five-hundred rupee notes, playing along to Papa’s lightheartedness, the boys told us that only two of them had fasted through Ramzan, and the others had chosen not to. Meanwhile, having been assured of his share by Zohirul Da, Meeraj melted into a corner, and poured himself into a game of Free Fire, which he played on a Chinese android phone with a cracked screen.
It was apparent that he had made an effort to look well off for when he’d arrive home the next morning. His hair was oiled and combed neatly to the back, and he was wearing a pair of tight blue jeans that had been ripped a little too deeply at the thighs, and a brown t-shirt that had a lot of red and yellow scribbles at the front, and some thick yellow stripes at the back. You could tell that the clothes were brand new. Moreover, I knew that the bunch had gone Eid shopping, as Zohirul Da, who had only recently sent me a friend request on Facebook, and made it a point to religiously comment on everything I posted, had put up pictures of their day out at Fancy Bazar.
“Eid Mubarok”, Papa told each of them, and gave them a hug each. I too followed suit, although I barely had any clue about what went into Eid celebrations. Mummum smiled and asked them to take care. As Meeraj and his comrades began their journey homeward, Guwahati slowly emptied. The inter-city bus-stands brimmed with those who wished to break bread with their families on Eid, and others who were just happy to get a few days off, each scrambling for their seats home. From the next day onwards, the roads would be sparse, and journeys from one end of the city to another wouldn’t necessitate meticulous planning. Things would be this way for a week or so.
King’s Cottage had taken quite a shape by the time that Zohirul Da returned, with fewer men this time. The painters and the tilers would soon join them. Roghu Da, the carpenter, and his apprentice Kanu, who was twice his mentor’s height, had already gotten to work. An occasional skirmish would arise between the different groups that my father—slowly turning impatient by then—would have to arbitrate upon quickly. Papa hoped to celebrate the next Diwali in our own house, and I too couldn’t wait to put my books into the two enormous shelves that were being built for me. Mummum, of course, was just pleased that she would be able to finally unpack the many cartons that remained filled with what was left of our twenty-two year long stay in the hills; the gramophone picked up from Delhi’s streets on an office trip that Papa had taken; the puppets that were a gift from some estranged cousin who lived in Rajasthan; the smoothened rocks that we had gathered from the bed of the seasonal river at the Dawki border; the rather impressive side profile of my face that Dennis sir, my father’s friend, and the art teacher back in Shillong, had casually clicked and framed for me when I was five. Of course, on the day we moved in, we tried to make our peace with the fact that a lot of things that had arrived were broken: a Durga Murti made of coffee bean shaped sea-shells, a string of clay pots that had cracked despite Mummum’s best efforts to preserve them, and of course, Dadun. Dadun’s twilight years were pierced by a quaking dementia that came with no warning. Perhaps the surreal idea of a nationwide lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic did not sit well with him, for he was a man who enjoyed his walks as much as he enjoyed reading his newspapers. When both were put to a halt, his sanity fluttered about restlessly for a few days, before slowly dwindling and making way for a numb stillness in the man, in which you could only hear the rise and fall of his breath. Papa and I carried him on our shoulders the day we finally moved into King’s Cottage, where he would breathe his last about a year later, and we’d have to lift him up on our shoulders once again while relatives and friends would ululate and chant prayers to his many gods.
But before all of this happened, and while the final touches were being added to the building, Zohirul Da had made a call, awakening my father on a rather early morning. Much to Papa’s annoyance, he had asked for more money, and urgently. “More money? Didn’t I pay you a hefty sum last week? You can’t keep up with this lootpat. We’ll talk tomorrow.” My father said, dropping the façade of his restrained authority over the family purse almost immediately. Papa is a light sleeper, and the payments he was then having to make to everyone, right from the blacksmith who was welding the iron gate, to the merchants who were selling us tiles from Gujarat, must have diluted whatever little sleep he was used to getting before by then.
“There’s been an emergency, Dada. I have to go home tonight. Please understand” Zohirul Da pleaded, his otherwise perpetually content voice a little wet.
“What emergency?” Papa had said, as he felt sleep seizing him again.
“My nephew is dead.”
…
The next morning, a black marble plaque with the words “King’s Cottage” etched onto it with golden letters arrived. By then, Zohirul Da had reached his village. By then, all childhood had been burned away from Meeraj’s face, and his body lay on the metal floor of the house that his mother had been gifted by this “sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic”. He was indeed, now a man.
During the Covid-19 lockdown, as highways, streets and gullies had been drained of all human life by men in Khaki uniforms, and factories and workplaces were shut down indefinitely, the likes of us had managed to retain our sanity by romanticizing the monotony that came with the safety within our cages. But for those, upon whose backs, this glorious country has been built—despite their ridiculously strong immunity—death and sorrow loomed closer than my father would have me believe. For weeks, the news had reeked of the blood and sweat of thousands of migrant laborers who had set out towards their hometowns and villages on foot, starving for food, transportation, and homes in which they could hide away from the disease. The khaki clad men, angered by their audacity to try and hold on to their own lives, had smashed batons onto some of their backs, and had crammed others inside heaving lockups. Many had been crushed under the wheels of India’s rapidly developing automobile industry, and many others had just succumbed to the weariness that came with walking thousands of miles. Those who had managed to make it back, had returned to the clutches of paralyzing poverty, and so by the time the lockdown had been lifted, their eagerness to return to work had ripened into a desperate compulsion. Soon, they would have to spread out all over the country again, not sparing time to mourn their fallen comrades—like waves of saline ointment ceaselessly washing over the wounds of a land aching, mourning for all that it had lost to the pandemic.
Young Meeraj, having done his part in building King’s Cottage, had also immersed himself in these waves, and had gotten lost like little droplets always do in the sea. It is only on that morning that I realized that he had not returned with the crew after Eid. And no matter how hard I tried to, I could not remember his face any longer, nor could I remember the way that he used to smile. The boy, and his childhood had both gone up in flames after a fire broke out in a factory in Gujarat that was paying a better wage than what he earned here, consuming every single inch of his body while he screamed for his mother. His mother must’ve wept when his corpse had arrived at their doorstep. How had it arrived this quickly, I wondered. Had violins played in the background like they do in the movies, when men died who at war were brought back to their mothers? Had every building he had ever laid a brick for come crashing down at the sound of his sisters’ wails? Mummum had cried when she got the news. Papa too, had sighed and spent his afternoon in silence. I only mourned him by trying to retain him in my poor, restive memory, trying the hardest I could to remember his face. But he was gone. With no warning, the boy had vanished from the face of the earth, and all the lives that he had left a mark on. No gods, or prayers could bring him back to life now.
By the time Zohirul Da returned, the plaque had gone up for all to see. The walls had been painted with pastel shaded colors that were easy for the eyes. The beds were made, the boxes moved and the rat-eaten throne finally flung into the adjacent lowland after Roghu Da’s futile attempts at remodeling it. It was a time of eventual goodbyes, and sometimes both Zohirul Da and Papa stood before the now white colored house, and smiled with much contentment. Meeraj found no mention in their conversations anymore. It was a few weeks before Diwali that we finally moved in, and the feasts that followed were grand. On Diwali, while my mother served piping portions of mutton and Ilish-mach for guests who were in awe of King’s Cottage, or at least had the decency to pretend that they were, the city skies had burst open with fireworks. I had thought of Meeraj that night.
This last month marked a decade since I have made Guwahati my home; and two years since I, and my family have taken root in King’s Cottage. Despite how deeply the city pours its madness into me, and floods its streets with my own, it still keeps me awake too often. On these nights, my lungs strobe at the whims of the smoke that rises from the mosquito repellent coiled up in a corner. It dances rather immodestly, swaying its fleshy, opaque waist against the walls, with no fear of the night. Somehow defying the sciences, it chooses to remain visible within the abject darkness, a feral white streak just floating about in my bedroom. I say nothing, and breathe it in. Some nights I give in to the mosquitoes’ whims, and spend a few hours on my balcony—soaking in the city like a soldier in his pulpit. At night, the city is bathed in a certain normalcy. Despite its insistence upon a metropolitan watermark, like a simpleton, it puts its children to sleep as the night sets in, and then stretches out on what I imagine is an uncomfortable mattress, leaving us to the mercy of the hungry mosquitoes. Sometimes a truck arrives with sand and stone that it has robbed the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra of, rattling the deep-sleeping city, but failing to awaken it. I imagine that the sleepy men who drive it let out a sigh of relief each time the truck comes to a halt before dumping their loot in front of dwindling plots of land, and rushing back towards the river again. No homes or over-bridges are built at night in Guwahati. No one feels the need to muster such unnecessarily enterprising courage. Peacetime comes with the luxury of waging our wars only during the day. The night is meant for sleeping. And so as I stand wide awake in its darkness and let my skin soak it in, I wonder if it isn’t peacetime for me.
The stray dogs below keep me company, gathering before our neighbor’s house and exchanging cacophonies and wails with his chocolate colored labrador Lucy. The metal gate keeps them apart, the insider and the outsider. As their barks pierce the silence of the gradually warming, gaping night, I wonder what they say to each other, Lucy, and those who gather at her doorstep. Are they too at war? Or do they pine to make love to each other shamelessly, and with no regard for the gods.
The first flush of morning shall arrive a little later, and I will feel my body give in to sleep again.
