We are bunkered down in the house, no contact with the world outside. My husband watches television all day. The news laps against my ears like waves at high tide. I constantly find myself in the kitchen – cooking, cleaning, doing the dishes, washing vegetables, chopping, cooking, cleaning. Rinse and repeat. The skin on my hands is eroding; bits get washed away under the tap and fall into the drain, reaching god knows where. Between chores, I remember to pop my pills. I try to be regular and sometimes even set alarms on my phone. But when the alarms go off, I forget why I set them. My husband has taught me to write the purpose against the alarm, but it’s too much of a bother. In fact, to tell you the truth – and please don’t share this with anyone, for they will find it ludicrous – I am mortally scared of phones. When mine begins to ring, I startle each time, jumpy at the thought of stuttering and stammering into it and getting all jumbled up. I would much rather see people in person than speak with them on the phone. But lately, people have shrunk to voices; when I think of them, I see only mouths moving, like the mouths of goldfish – it’s become nearly impossible to imagine them having flesh-and-blood forms. So, when the phone rings these days, I look pleadingly at my husband, who is working from home: Please do me this favour, please see who that is, tell them I’ll call back, I’m cooking mutton, or feeding the baby, or even better – cleaning the toilet! His eyes reply: One of these days, I’ll start charging for such favours – how long can a man keep doing charity like this, without wanting anything in return? When I’m feeling a little sunnier, I wink at him and turn my gaze in the direction of the bedroom.

Sometimes, the baby comes to the rescue. She begins to bawl as if on cue. And she can really bawl! Opening her throat wide and nearly tearing her lungs apart. Once she begins to cry, it’s a long time before she stops. Maybe it’s because she’s not allowed breast milk. The result of a choice I had to make between resuming my pills and letting her feed off me. She’s on formula these days. Doesn’t like it much, I reckon. An expressive baby, this one. Doesn’t flinch from displaying her resentment by howling up a storm. Not to sound less motherly or anything, but she is like the heavy copper thaali that my old neighbour banged on when the prime minister asked us all to thank the health workers who were putting their lives on the line. She stood on her balcony, gnarled old hands banging the thaali, until it slipped from her grip and fell on top of another neighbour’s brand-new BMW. You can imagine the fireworks afterwards – louder than all the thaalis put together. My baby can amplify her resistance quite like that.

People are only speculating, but my baby, it seems, is sure it’s a case of biological warfare. She has this knack of finding out things, even though she doesn’t have a language yet.

She is an exceptional child, I knew that even while I was carrying her. I would be lying on my back, and in my sleep, she would crawl out of my navel, sit on my belly, and stare at me for a while. Then she’d get down and walk around, surveying the house she was soon to be inducted into. Because this happened in the first trimester, sometimes she would be missing a palm, sometimes a hand, and at other times, a few toes or fingers. The night would pass that way, but the mornings for me would be filled with utter panic: getting dressed in a rush, zigzagging through traffic to the clinic. Watching me sweating and terrified, the sonologist, too, would sweat a bit until the little mass floating in the black sea inside me ticked all the organ and limb boxes. On our return journey, my husband’s suppressed annoyance would tremble on his lips but never breach the vow he had made to the shrink. Empathy and support, this is what the caregiver must extend; kindness and restraint, the words etched on his heart.

Some days before I went into labour, she had sneaked out and run away on her tiny feet, out into the world. That she could run away before being born was a wonder – I was convinced of her magic. At first, I thought she would never return. Feeling short-changed, I said to myself: Good riddance! Let the foolish ingrate stay homeless, learn to beg and eat on the streets. She doesn’t know what’s good for her.

To keep me from spiralling, my husband said with a cold calm: “Let her roam around a bit, see what the world has come to. She can’t have gone too far; she’ll surely return to you.” He was right – on not-yet-firm feet, how far could she go, that too on a state holiday? A few kilometres at best, up to the multiplex or the metro station. She would have to return from all the closed shutters to my belly and incubate until it was time to hatch.

We’d had a hard time conceiving. Two miscarriages and a few nervous breakdowns later, we managed to get the psychiatrist to agree that we were up to the task, and he came up with a strategy. The fertility clinic worked overtime to ensure that two embryos appeared like fireflies on the screen a few months later – tiny pulses of light. One of them vanished, and the other split into two. What joy, the possibility of having two when one was barely deserving of one! In the following weeks, I noticed and marvelled at everything that existed in twos: two mynahs, two-wheelers, two eyes, two ears, two legs of trousers, a pair of socks, two eggs in the fridge, even the toothbrushes sticking together in our bathroom – two for joy!

But as luck would have it, one of the twins perished in the ninth week. The doctor said it wasn’t unusual; I said it wasn’t unusual for twins, triplets, even quadruplets to be born – to other people. A crass cousin of my husband’s had joked at a drunken dinner some months ago: “These treatments are so expensive, one has to extract one’s money’s wort – two shouldn’t even be haggled for, three or four would justify the cost and get you return on investment.” I had stared at him in disbelief then, but now, I too – would you believe it – said to my husband, “It’s a lot of money for just one, not a good bargain even by my standards.” My husband grimaced, loosening his grip on my palm, probably in disgust.

Disappointment done with, I developed an affinity for the lone firefly – the last soldier standing. Poor thing. Abandoned by its vanished twin. So alone, so lonely in the dark realm of my womb, yet so brave, so unrelenting. It’s truly the fittest that survives. I thought to myself, I should protect it, handle it with care, like a piece of china … Oh, let me not name that blighted, conniving, ruthless country that will stop at nothing to destroy the world. Their conspiracies have led to this; they developed this ugly thing with spikes on it and unleashed this contagion – so my daughter tells me through her eloquent cries.

But back now to the silent speck of light in my churning uterus. Defying all the strong waves that washed over her, she began to grow, attaching herself to me with a cord to convince me that she intended to stay and wanted to be loved and cherished. I smiled so much in those days that my jaw began to ache. But it could not be helped, because we had received a gift from God, to whom we adults were attached with an invisible cord, not as bloodied and smeared with sticky fluids and gooey tissues as the umbilical one, but no less nourishing, my parents had taught me.

So, this firefly grew, and I grew with her. As did the rumblings in my mind, like precursors to a soundless hurricane. The mushroom clouds of brain fog that had shrunk to the size of a golf ball—not as heavy, but not as light as a table-tennis ball either – began to gather mass again and emit sparks that weren’t within my will to contain, for the pills had been stopped. The poles that had been pushed to different ends and kept at a healthy distance began to look each other in the eye. They came steadily closer in their game of attract-and-repel, the sport gathering speed and animosity as the weeks went by. It was tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye, untethered laughter and uncontrolled tears trying to defeat each other at any cost. When there was harmony, there was too much harmony; when there was cacophony, there was discordance unbound. The harmony would come bubbling out and spill over, joy exploding like a carnival in the house – humming, singing, chatting, with thoughts running about like darts; the cacophony was oddly quiet, visible and audible only to me – a blade in one trembling hand, the other wrist swinging between doubt and eagerness; a dried-up bouquet in the head, hands and feet rotting, heart weeping buckets. Perhaps the dog knew, for he would lie under my bed in some sort of solidarity if I slept too long, or scratch the bathroom door in a frenzy if I stayed in too long.

Excerpted with permission from Grief Burns Like Fever, Minakshi Thakur, Westland.

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