She closed the screen door behind her. The snow made it seem like her shoes were filled with water, but she ignored the sensation and made for the line of trees fifty metres from the cabin.
She didn’t want to go into the woods proper, because they scared her, but she wanted a few trees around her for Privacy. Even with her back to the cabin she could feel the eyes of The Parents trained on her, their awareness hovering like refracted light in the cold.
She looked back as she reached the first tree. The cabin seemed abandoned and small from where she was standing. She turned and kept walking. She could sense a subtle shift in the world as she went past that first tree, standing straight like a sentinel. It was more silent here, more Adult. Outside the woods the whole world babied her. But within their confines she felt more like herself: older, and detached from a body which didn’t seem to reflect her age very well.
When she was sure no one could see or hear her, she stopped.
She stood silently, surveying the scene around her.
The summer noise of saplings and shrubs and bug nests and grass and flowers had been muffled by the snow. But there was a large, round stone lying at the base of one of the trees. It was as big as her head and proudly uncovered by snow; grey, pocked and lined with black streaks, with a slight depression in the middle like a place for someone to rest their head.
She walked towards it. Her breath rose in clouds. The cold air hurt her throat if she breathed too fast, and so she made her breaths slow and deep, so that her body could warm the air before it reached her lungs.
She guessed she had about ten minutes before The Parents noticed her absence and started Raising Hell. Truthfully, she found them melodramatic and unreasonable. Much of her life consisted of carefully parcelling out information to them so they didn’t stop her from doing things that were appealing to her.
Which, at that moment, was lifting That Rock clean above her head.
She flexed her arms and grunted performatively, focusing her mind’s eye on two things: He-Man and a photograph from her history textbook of women miners carrying piles of rocks above their heads.
She crouched and worked her fingers around That Rock. The snow started to melt and run over her hands, numbing the tips of her fingers so she couldn’t feel anything.
This is good, it’s a new discovery. If you’re cold, you don’t feel pain.
When she went back to her room, she’d write a letter to the Prime Minister to apprise him of this information.
That Rock felt like it was glued to the ground.
She let go of it and straightened, breathing hard. Her arms and throat were starting to cramp.
“Stupid rock!” she screamed and kicked it.
Something in the earth seemed to loosen its grip. It moved.
She looked at it for a moment and, as though hypnotized, she started to lift it again, grimacing as she went.
The weight of it terrified her; That Rock seemed to want to pull her somewhere deep inside the ground. But she strained up and up, her arms elongated from the weight, and slowly That Rock rose a centimetre above ground, then two, then five.
It left a halo of moss and dirt and dead things in the snow. It was like the scene from The Lion King where Timon and Pumbaa find juicy, candy-coloured bugs under a rock, only everything here was dead in a roiling, blackish mulch.
In the centre of the mulch was a slender white arc. She could pretend to be a paleontologist, but she just stared at the lizard skeleton arched like an eyebrow in dark black mud, feeling cold.
She staggered and lost her grip and managed to angle her body just before she dropped That Rock so that it didn’t land on her foot.
It fell heavily on the ground, and the sound of the drop was a subliminal buzz like the aftermath of an explosion. There was something forlorn about the way it lay there, fallen away from what had been its home for so long, and all at once she felt bad and ashamed that she had disturbed it for no reason.
What do you feel?
I don’t feel anything.
Her nose had started to run. She wiped it with the back of her hand and wiped the tears from her eyes. She turned towards the cabin and walked out of the woods.
*
The box room has just a desk by a small window that overlooks a black-and-white world. Framed by the window, the trees and the snow and the sky are like paper cutouts held against each other. There’s a flurry of winter shrubs around the trunks of the trees, sprinkled with starry red berries which occasionally gleam in the light from the cabin.
Her teeth chatter from the cold.
The heat lamp is off.
She checks the power socket. The plug is half in. She plugs it in properly and the lamp comes on, the light strong and warm on the grain of the desk.
She holds her hands to it and rubs them together.
The clay underneath the lamp will soon turn soft. She’ll know it’s ready when the sides start to glisten.
It’s tempting to remain crouched over the lamp, but instead, she gets out a stained canvas case and takes her tools out of it.
There are double-sided loops, a spatula, a thin carving blade, and a metal ball. She’s seen people with drawers and drawers filled with every kind of tool to make any mark they could possibly need to make, but you only need five. That’s how she privately distinguishes a professional from an amateur. The business ends of her tools are scrupulously clean, but the pale, slightly discoloured wooden handles have bits of old clay caked to them.
She starts working on the armature while the clay warms. She mixes a hardener and a resin to make the epoxy, takes a length of aluminium wire and scoops a blob of the epoxy mix to attach it to a thick ceramic tile. Then she uses the epoxy to attach a second length of wire at a 120-degree angle to the first one.
She covers the top and the joint with putty and presses it down to make the sharp angles of the wire smoother.
She checks the clay.
It looks ready to eat.
She smiles to herself. She’d tried eating a wedge of clay once when it had sat shining under a lamp. For some reason she’d expected it to be texturally pleasant, but it had dried out her mouth and become endlessly slippery, her teeth plunging in and out of it like pistons.
Out the window, the tops of the trees move frantically in the wind, a wind which descends from the wilder mountains further north. She can see their jagged tops blue against the sky on clear days. Tonight, the sky is black with clouds. The wind is tossing the leaves about under the branches, and their dark shapes are silhouetted against the snow like bats. It’s strange to see the intensity of their motion but hear nothing.
There is no light outside, nothing for miles. The other cabins were torn down a long time ago. She remembers them very dimly. Normally she’d have the night sky and the moon as distant, comforting presences, something she could see and ascribe a vague personality to. But with these clouds, even they are hidden from her.
The lamp is red, and against the wooden walls of the cabin it glows even redder. Lina wonders what it must look like from the outside. Through the dark opening of the window, she feels unnoticed, as though she’s passed on, like an afterimage, fading from the world.
The door to Their Room is ajar. No matter how many times she tries to shut it.
A pair of eyes shine in the dark slit of the open door, framed by the hair her mother used to have, with a body dressed in the clothes her mother had worn that holiday.
She must have worn many, but Lina can only remember a grey woollen kurta over a pair of jeans so bleached and faded they were almost white.
Sometimes Lina can see something of her own breathing in the still gaze of the eyes. Their white glitter, a pulse of light.
They drove back down the mountain after the week spent here, and grew old and changed and mellowed, but in the cabin they’re still the same. A version of her parents that never left, never aged, that remained confusing and frightening, veiled even from the empathy of her adult self.
They had looked different then. Like alien clones of the people her parents are now. Looming and remote, somehow, though she couldn’t deny that as parents they were always loving and involved.
I’m never alone.
She wishes there was a lake here, or a pond.
She’s always wanted to try ice skating.
It must feel a little like flying.
Ice splitting and being smoothed over again and again, and then a blade, a spray of cut ice—then air and water and skin and fragile bone. A different kind of sculpting.
She speaks aloud to feel less alone:
“Why do you do such things?”
“Because that’s what I’m like.”
“But you know right from wrong.”
“What you think is right isn’t right for everyone.”
It starts to snow as she works. The snow drifts over the world, and flakes come to rest between leaves and branches, between rivers of raised wood on the tree trunks. They move slowly across the window, blotting and erasing the land.
Lina gazes past the snow, into the darkness under the trees.
They would wake up to the sound of the kettle boiling in the kitchen, she and her father groaning at the incursion without fail every day; the rustle of the curtains as her mother pulled them back, the sound of her quick step on the floor, rarely still.
It was a long time ago. Why is it coming back to me now?
Her mother would make coffee for the three of them: milky and sugary for her father, black for herself, and a glass of cold milk with a dusting of instant coffee to satisfy Lina.
“There’s bits in here, Mummy! I don’t like malai and you always forget!”
And the way her mother would jump up, leaving her own drink untouched, leaving it to get cold. “I’ll fix it,” as she took Lina’s glass and poured the milk through a sieve into another mug.
I’m the same age she was when we came here that year.
Her mother’s smiling face had seemed endlessly youthful to Lina when she’d been little, as unshakable as the sun, but now, filtered through years of memories, had something painful and terrible about it.
Her phone buzzes. Lina breaks focus from the clay in front of her and takes a beat to steady herself before she answers.
“Hey, babe!” Lina winces at the sound of Jaya munching on an apple, made worse by the static on the line. She remembers how Jaya’s propensity to speak with her mouth full once led her to almost choke on a piece of cheese when they were at school, where they first became friends.
She tries to match Jaya’s energy. “Hey, miss!”
“Are you at your very own personal retreat?”
“Yep. As usual. Working on a new project.”
“Woo. Like clockwork—you’re there without fail every year, no? What’s the film about?”
“Uh.” Lina glances at the ceiling, brow furrowed. “The antichrist, I think. The bad guys are bringing him back.”
“The antichrist? Again? It’s always about the fucking antichrist with these people.”
“The antichrist sells. And they want practical effects.”
“I guess. When will it come out?”
“Two years?”
“Cool. You know, I love how you get to continue your dad’s business. It’s great that there’s someone else in the family who loves it too. How is he?”
“Um. He doesn’t watch new films anymore. He hates CGI. Says craft is dead. And I think it scares him that we’re lucky to get one project a year when we used to have, like, up to five at once.”
“Gosh.” Jaya doesn’t speak for a moment. “Still, it’s great you get to continue his legacy.”
“Yeah.”
“So.”
“Mm?”
“I have to tell you something.”
Lina pauses in her work, sensing what’s about to happen. “Okay.”
“I’m having a baby!”
Speak, don’t stop. “Wow! Wow, wow, wow! Congratulations!”
“Thank you so much!”
“Wow, when are you due? This is huge.”
“Next March! Can you believe it?”
“Oh, okay, a spring baby!” Lina’s heart is hammering. She wonders if Jaya can hear it.
“Yes!”
“I’m so, so happy for you.” I sound insincere. She knows I don’t mean it.
“Aw, thank you.”
Lina closes her eyes. What else should I say? I can’t keep talking—I can’t think, I need a break, just a few seconds to get—
A thud from Jaya’s side. “Oops, sorry, Lina, I have to go! I’ll call you later, though, I didn’t mean to cut you off!”
She pushed a book off a desk and used is as an excuse to hang up on me.
She thinks I’m lonely and jealous.
That’s not fair. She’s being nice. She was nice to you at school, even when you weren’t.
Lina pushes her chair back.
The head of The Creature isn’t coming out well at all. She’d wanted an effect with stretched skin, but in the time passed with Jaya the clay had begun to dry in a spread of goose pimples instead of the smooth finish she’d wanted.
The goose pimples of Jaya’s pregnancy.
Lina grins to herself, then allows the grin to fade as she considers the half-made head of The Creature.
She had made so many Creatures over the years that they could be an exhibit of her life. A blue ribbon from her first formal dress moved like a snake through the jaw of one of them. The shape and colour of the eyes on another came from a vain and careless man who had strung her along for months and then been four hours late to their first date only to admit that he had feelings for someone else.
All these bits of her life were here with no one to read them; moments etched painstakingly on the grotesque faces and monstrous forms which dutifully adorned the poorly reviewed films they were born for, never to be seen again.
Lina stands in front of the window.
She feels winded. She’s off balance, like she’d never known what she wanted, like she isn’t winning at Life. Her eyes become unfocused. Outside, the white and black of the landscape slowly come apart, like ice cracking to let cold, black water pool in.
She closes her eyes and again she sees the trembling shoulders of her mother.
Opening her eyes, she sits down to work.
She looks at the head for a few seconds, then turns it away from herself. She lays her fingers on either side of the neck, above the shaggy edge.
She can’t bring herself to work on it. There’s a feeling of love met with anguish. She loves it too much.
Lina puts her phone on the desk. She pushes it askew and straightens it. The light from the heat lamp makes a glowing red line on the curved side of the phone. Her face is wet. Her mother in front of the cabin. Her face turned away from anyone who might be watching. Her shoulders shaking in the silence of the snow.
Little Lina stared at her from the window as she stood there, unable to stop, and there had been a terrifying feeling like love, like anguish.
*
There are fresh cheetal tracks in the snow the next morning, three sets coming towards the cabin from the left.
When she goes further into the woods, she finds another set of prints. Something bigger than cheetal, tracking and waiting in the trees. A few days ago, she’d found a shed antler at the base of a broad rosewood tree. At the kirana store in town she’d heard of sightings of a bear in the area.
A muscle in Lina’s cheek jumps.
She lifts her head and stares at the trees around her as if to wordlessly interrogate them.
Pale sky slices through the spaces between them, and they are silent and cold and windless.
Antlers bother her. How the flow of blood could just—stop. How the body could seal off a part of itself and shed it.
Lina sniffs, stamps her feet in the snow to make her own set of giant prints to frighten this creature. She turns back to the cabin.
She tramps through the snow, breathing hard. She passes by her mother, standing where she had stood all those years ago, and stops to look into her face. It is smooth and blank as a stone. Nothing emerges; nothing shifts.
She takes out her phone as she goes inside the cabin.
Three rings—
“Hello!”
Lina’s voice catches at the sound of her mother’s voice. “Hi, Mamma, what’s going on?”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes, yes. How are you?”
“Just boiling milk.”
“Oh. What did Saurabh say?”
“Oh! Saurabh the extraordinary milkman.” Lina can hear her smiling. “He came late—”
“As usual.”
“—and I finally confronted him and told him to make up his mind if he wants to deliver milk in the first place. He said I should be grateful to get any milk at all because it was raining and he wasn’t delivering to anyone else. Then he called me argumentative and ran into the lift.”
Lina chuckles. “But you still won’t let him go.”
“He has a Gir cow! And he’s been delivering milk to us since he was fifteen, he’s just a kid.”
“Yeah.”
Their call stands in silence for a few seconds.
“Well, all right. I just wanted to check on you, Ma.”
“And you’re fine, aren’t you?”
“It’s just going a little slower.”
“You’re not scared, are you? To sleep there alone?”
Why can’t you find a hobby that’s not me?
Lina turns her back to the wall where she senses her shadow mother’s gaze boring through from the room beyond. “No, I’m a grown woman, in case you forgot.”
“Okay, then.” Her mother sounds doubtful.
Lina chews on her lip. Fuck it. “I need to ask you something.”
“Yes, you do need to rinse rice before you cook it, Lina—”
“No, Mom, just—did you ever feel like—” Lina pauses, wondering how to phrase it. “Did you ever find it weird? Dad’s work?”
Her mother laughs. “Building sculptures? Well, he was an engineer when I married him. He only started making his models full-time once he had some clients lined up.” Silence while her mother thinks for a moment. “But yes. In the beginning I thought it was very silly.”
Lina sits down. “I’m so glad you let me follow in his footsteps to do something very silly, Ma.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, beta. Did something happen? Did someone say something?”
“Nothing happened.” Lina speaks through gritted teeth. “I’m just—stuck. I make this shit and that’s it. I don’t do anything profound, I don’t make art, I just make glorified…roadkill.”
Her mother is silent. “Do you think I do anything profound?”
“What?” Lina says, nonplussed.
Once more, their call falls silent.
When her mother answers, the words seem to stick in her throat. “I was always good. Even when—” She stops. “I was always good,” she repeats. “Is that profound?”
I don’t want this. I don’t want to hear whatever this is.
“I have to go, okay? Bye.”
Everything is not always about you, Ma!
“Bye, beta.” Her mother sounds unbearably gentle.
Shame and regret the minute she cuts the call.
*
She was on the verge of falling asleep.
He watched her in the mirror. A toy that came with the kid’s burger meal she’d insisted on buying but never finished had fallen to the floor of the car. That was enough to tell him she didn’t want it. The toys she loved were well taken care of, painfully so, and sometimes it bothered him how careful she was with them; he wondered if either of them was ever too sharp with her about her things. If they’d said something fleetingly which she’d taken to heart.
The car rounded a corner. A narrow band of sky twisted above the trees lining the road. It was only four in the afternoon, but it got darker sooner here in the mountains.
Pine trees on both sides of the road. Under the trees was dense foliage that occasionally parted to reveal a bird, langur, or cheetal, which reassured him in the stillness of the empty road.
The side of the mountain rose gently on their left, and a ray of sunlight hit the diamond-shaped sign coming up on his side of the road and dazzled him.
“How far is it, did you see?”
His wife looked up and managed to catch the sign just as he drove past.
“Seven kilometres.”
“Thanks.” He glanced at the thickly bound manuscript and the large writing pad in her lap. “Aren’t you feeling sick doing that in the car?”
“Not especially,” she said as she put the tip of her pen under her chin.
This was how it was, lately. He wanted to talk; she didn’t. It had got him feeling needy and insecure, like she was off doing bigger and better things in her mind. When she got this way, he couldn’t stop himself from re-evaluating every one of their shared moments, wondering over and over if she even liked him, if she’d ever liked him. And now that she had started working on a manuscript, it could easily be half a year and three drafts before her every waking thought wasn’t consumed with the world she created, before she came back to them.
It isn’t fair. Why is she working? She doesn’t have to, he thought
Daddy and Mummy are fighting.
In the back seat, Lina was only pretending to sleep. She liked pretending because it made her parents think she wasn’t listening. But that’s when she was the most attentive, alert to their every word, their every change in tone. She needed them to not fight, so she could be happy.
“Do you know who’ll be there this time?” Lina’s mother asked.
“I think the usual crowd. It’s only ever the five of us.”
“Good. I like it. I like that we do this every year.”
“Yeah. I hope she likes it.” He darted a look at Lina in the back seat.
“I think she will.”
“I mean, I grew up in a big family.”
“Mmhm.”
“I don’t know how she does it.”
She smiled. “She’s happy on her own.”
“That’s true.”
“You make it sound like it’s a bad thing.”
“Don’t you agree?”
She didn’t say anything.
He glanced at her, swallowed.
Say something, he thought.
He loved having serious conversations with her, loved arguing, even when they were fighting, he felt safe, like they were Adults, together against the world. It felt special. And he wanted her to respond to him, to be serious, to watch as a line appeared between her eyebrows as she considered his question, for them to talk about something they couldn’t talk about with anyone else, and then be alone together in their room in the cabin, let the memory of their conversation, the weight of it, carry over into sex.
She only smiled and shook her head instead
He thinks about how he’ll make The Creature.
He had been considering baked beans, or maybe pureed baked beans mixed with concrete.
It’s awesome. I can do what I want to do, I can be a mad scientist with this. It’ll look like a goopy syrupy lumpy ’80s schlock fest, he thought.
“Look at that.” He pointed at some roadkill on the side of the highway. He could feel a laugh, smoky and gurgling, in the back of his throat. “Look at the texture on that.” Just as he said it, he wanted to take it back, because they didn’t like gore as much as he did.
But she looked at him and cupped his elbow briefly.
Oh, God. Something washed over him at her touch and suddenly he wanted her very badly.
He was much more tactile than her; he was much more voluble than her. It made him feel alone and in need of her validation. He caught sight of their daughter in the mirror. Their validation.
He shifted his thoughts to their destination instead, visualizing the cabins as he had last seen them. At dusk, they would be squares of light within wooden exoskeletons which looked more real than their surroundings. The whole thing was 0nce an old British hunting outpost, built for grand hunting parties with elephants, silverware, and crates of champagne carried through thick jungle by unnamed brown men. It had been refashioned into a boutique retreat; a collection of smaller cabins clustered around a long building in the middle.
Lina had given up pretending to sleep; her parents were boring today.
She opened her copy of Big Dinosaurs from Long Ago, her face intent with concentration. It was filled with two-page illustrations of long necks and sweeping ochre landscapes, with clever reptilian faces and sinuous tails, orange and green and flecked in black.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to imagine the enormity of the world in those pages: a world with no buildings or boundaries, with water where land should be, monstrous fishes with bizarre faces swimming around everywhere. She pictured how different everything had been back then, and it dawned on her how easily everything could all change again.
Were they happy?
Her eyes flew open, wide and unfocused.
I’m going to die.
She looked up.
In the rear-view mirror, her mother’s dark eyes were boring into hers.
Lina’s chest lifted and dropped in the silence of the gaze.
Carefully plucked eyebrows, like the tail of a raptor curving downwards.
For the first time, her mother seemed separate from the world, separate from Lina, a shining universe of her own.
Lina looks away.
