Siddhanth touched his grandmother's face. She was seventy. Her skin clung to her bones like soft, un-ironed linen and her smile was slow and measured. He pressed his nose to her forehead.
She shuddered when the adjacent room's frantic whispers burst suddenly, like the welts on her skin, and dribbling words and whimpers drained viscously from the door left ajar.
There was a loud smack and Siddhanth's father fell silent. In Siddhanth's mind, in the room with the ink-stained desk, his mother lay curled on the floor. She wore a red dress, smelled of sandalwood, and vermillion, once glowing between her striking eyebrows, was smeared down the bridge of her nose. She stared vacantly at nowhere in particular. Right eye twitching, left bulging out, looking as though it was trying to escape the confines of socket and lid. Saliva pooled near her cheek and streamed down the right side of her face. Like lost thoughts. Poems written at three a.m in greymatter alone, then forgotten. Planned, penned and burned. The epitome of futility.
Siddhanth remembered how his father had thrown his toys into the bin and how he laughed when he cried, jiggling on his knee.
His mother lay on the same floor, crying the same Unrest of Something Forgotten and Something Lost.
The same day, a girl in a white cotton dress with green eyes and sunshimmered hair breathed her first breath of unbreathable Indian air.