Milk Teeth

by Amrita Mahale

Board exams were the Indian epidemic that afflicted entire families at once. Cable connections were disconnected, social lives were paralysed, and all big decisions were suspended till the end of the exam season.

You could put all the French or Italian you wanted in their names, but you couldn’t take Mumbai out of the buildings: the clothes drying outside the windows would remain, and so would the mud streaks from flowerpots on windowsills.

How sheer some memories made you, how powerless you were before them.

What Kartik had said about loneliness, about the need for a deep companionship, she knew all too well: the stillness, the stasis one carried within, untouched by the kinetic city and its seductions. Even with Vinay, the good days—there had been more than a few of those—had felt like warm bliss. She missed that. This was hard to hope for with friends, and it became harder each year as all the competing claims multiplied: marriage, children, family, career. She wanted somebody to whom she could say, we are in this together.