She was looking for sunblock when she found the sweater. It took her a minute to assimilate it. A mistake: it had to be a mistake. She fingered the thick wool, repelled by the automatic discomfort of unseasonable clothing. It had no business there. She had packed the suitcase for a subtropical monsoon. It didn’t belong.
She tugged and it emerged endlessly, like a scarf from a magician’s arm. It was a cable knit edifice, once white, with blue stripes at the neck and sleeves. A tennis sweater. She didn’t play tennis. It was musty, several sizes too big for her. Just the right size for someone who was six-foot-two.
She dropped it, her pulse racing, as though the wool had turned into naked wire. She covered it with light dresses and blouses, and hoped the mustiness wouldn’t creep into everything. The knitted braiding lingered in impressions on her fingers.
Her phone buzzed. She picked it up from the fraying red dhurrie – “homely”, the listing had said, tying her fate to a typo – and saw a photo of a giant bronze hand clenched in an incomprehensible symbol.
“Top o’ the mornin’!” bleated the text.
It brought back the other images, unravelling like flashing marquees: a giant circuit board of a city. Endless walkways and an onion-shaped head.
“They call them moo-dras. Have you seen the classical dances?”
“No.”
“And the music? What do they call that instrument – the harmonium?”
“I don’t know . . .”
Generic duty-free outlets. A quick snatch at a passport.
“I thought your name was Aria!”
“I’ve always been called Aria.”
The deathly antiseptic odour that had followed her across the world.
She locked the screen and looked towards the blinds. It was still early but smidgens of light filtered through, drawing her to the terrace like an incantation. Her spirits lifted. She had been waiting to go outside. It didn’t feel real while she was holed up behind walls; she had to be out there, to survey the landscape and ratify that she was indeed here.
She was here.
In spite of everything, an involuntary smile broke out as she breathed in the textures: the cawing of a peacock, the heavy languor of the elements and, always, the faint smell of torrents barely held back. India. It was out there, all of it. All the lost things.
The view was greener than she expected, so bucolic she could almost believe she had boarded the wrong plane were it not for the layers of concrete simmering in the distance. Her attention was immediately seized by the other view, the one that wasn’t an accident of place but of time: the sandstone dome shimmering like a hologram between the trees. Humayun’s Tomb, she remembered from the listing. Its presence was comforting. Timeless and witness to time: it had weathered worse trials.
She brushed off the debris from a stained plastic table and took out her phone. Another message from Lexi, urging her to get in touch once she got settled so they could take in a performance, maybe catch a round of drinks with some of Dennis’s charming colleagues. She mused ruefully on the sorry figure she must have presented.
The other conversation blazed at her. “Have you landed? Are you all right? Have you reached the house?” There were nearly a dozen questions in the same vein, each more pressing than the last, and a response compressed into a single frigid syllable: “Yes.” She felt her systems shuttering, the ebullience of moments ago drying up.
The last message was from a couple of hours earlier. “Is it as you imagined?”
She forced herself to look up and consider the dome again, the final resting place of a forgotten emperor. As her finger hovered over the screen, she caught sight of a discoloured petal slipping down the railing. She picked it up, her throat suddenly constricted, and wondered if it was what she had come for. Another accident of time. Like herself.
She deleted the message and put away her phone.
The family downstairs were harder to fob off with monosyllables.
“How old are you?”
“Are you studying?”
‘What brings you to Delhi?’
“I’m taking a year off to travel,” she replied, trying not to sound too rehearsed, “before I begin my master’s.” She accepted a generously buttered toast from Khyati.
“And your parents? What do they do?” asked Shyam, reaching for the pickle.
She stiffened. The antiseptic odour rose again.
“Cold paratha again!” complained the grandmother, her hand quivering over the plastic table cover. “No wonder our guest isn’t eating anything!”
“Amma,” her son gently rebuked her as Khyati rolled her eyes.
“My mother-in-law would have walked out of the house if she was served cold parathas,” she continued, shaking her head, “or thrown them in my face!”
“If only,” muttered Khyati.
Excerpted with permission from The Scent of Fallen Stars, Aishwarya Jha, Penguin India.