Chapter - 1
Nandini has lost
count how many temples, shrines, trees she has left red threads heavy with
prayers to find Deva. From the char dhams to the churches in Goa to the Pir
baba darghas pleading …
“Come
Back, I am here; I haven’t moved an inch away. Please come back to me.”
BUT
THE THREADS REMAIN TIED.
Knots.
Everywhere she goes she sees them, She feels them. She fumbles with them; her
fingers an angry jumble of thumbs. Her love is a knot that cannot be undone.
Her intestines churn each time she waits
for the phone to ring. Her veins are a maze of labyrinth. Who knows where they
begin and where they end. The only time it ever mattered was when she needed
them severed and stared undecidedly over her wrist with no understanding of
physiology.
Her fingers do not stay still anymore.
They tremble when she watches them and turn stiff when she pretends to fall
asleep
Knots in her stomach, knots in her
chest. Nandini turned every living memory of Deva into a living being that pulses
with life that begs to be kept. When she can’t sleep she looks at ceilings,
willing Deva to appear. Untying knots are tedious and painful. Imagine combing
out dread locked hair after 14 years of Banwas.
Patiently,
penitently, pick, pull, and loosen, Untie, Undo, Unmake, Unwill, Unwant.
Nandini is thinking of all these little
words and the impossible things they mean. She is thinking of how Deva’s name,
small enough to fit into her pocket, spans the skyline and the depth of all
oceans.
She is thinking of how the word,
“untie”, can be rearranged to “unite”. And because there is nothing left to do
with their realizations and personal dawning, She cuts another line of string
and take her shoes off before making one more knot in Deva’s name that she will
never be able to undo.
