X.

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Just before dawn, I heard a frog croaking near the kiln.

 

At first it sounded like nonsense—a wet, throaty baritone bubbling from the mud:

“A-vid… a-vid… a-vid…”

 

Then, suddenly—loud and sharp:

 

“Avidya!”

 

I froze.

 

The frog didn’t move. It sat on a patch of brick, throat still pulsing, eyes fixed on nothing in particular.

 

By the time I stepped outside, it was gone.

 

I didn’t tell Meera. What would I say?

 

That morning, the child took his first step.

 

Our son learned to walk in the space between monsoons.

 

One moment he was crawling, dust on his knees and mouth always wet with questions, and the next he was upright—arms outstretched, legs unsteady—shouting his triumph with every step, as if he had invented the act itself.

 

Meera watched him with quiet pride. She never praised loudly—just nodded, as if he had finally done what she’d always known he would. But later, when she thought I wasn’t watching, I saw her bury her face in the corner of her sari and laugh until her shoulders shook.

 

We named him Aru.

 

Not after a god or a star or a family line, but after a sound he made as a baby when he tried to call the wind.

 

Aru was stubborn. He refused to eat if the food was too hot, refused to sleep unless he was between us—one hand on each of our chests, like a bridge. His hair grew in wild tufts. His voice carried through the trees.

 

He was ours. Utterly.

 

The days grew long and sticky. The air smelled of ripe guava and pressed earth. Meera tied her hair up every morning and let it fall again by noon. I worked in the kiln with the potter and showed Aru how to roll little beads of clay between his fingers.

 

Sometimes he’d press them into his mouth and declare them sweet.

 

He had favorite things—a bent spoon, a yellow string, the ghee tin with a dent in the side. He dragged them everywhere like small sacred relics. Once, he hid the temple bell under our sleeping mat. We found it only after three days of wondering if the gods had taken offense.

 

He was two when he first said my name.

 

Not “father,” not “appa,” not anything formal. Just my name—as if we were equals, co-conspirators in the game of living.

 

Meera heard it from across the courtyard and didn’t say a word. But that night, she sang to him while feeding him lentils, and I swear her voice changed.

 

It carried something deeper.

Something I hadn’t heard since the night we first lay together,

listening to frogs and stars.

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XI.

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One afternoon, the potter called me to the kiln—not with words, but with the sound of his limp.

Soft, regular.

A kind of punctuation on the dust.

 

He held a cracked jar in his hands.

 

“Fix it,” he said.

 

I took the jar, turned it slowly. The break was clean—a fault along the base, as if it had snapped from its own weight.

 

“I could patch it,” I said. “But it won’t hold water.”

 

He grunted. “Then make something new.”

 

He handed me a lump of fresh clay, already damp, already waiting.

 

We worked in silence.

 

The kiln hissed in its low, hungry way. Aru was nearby, asleep in the shade with one of Meera’s scarves draped over his stomach. Meera was at the well with the other women, her voice occasionally floating above the splash of water and gossip.

 

The potter’s hands were slower now. His limp more pronounced. But his fingers still knew the shape of a pot before it was born. He pressed the wheel pedal with the edge of his good foot and said, without looking up, “The boy’s growing.”

 

“He is.”

 

“Too fast.”

 

I didn’t answer. He was right.

 

“He looks like you,” he added.

 

I smiled. “That’s his only flaw.”

 

The potter laughed—once, short and dry. “Don’t let your love soften your hands.”

 

He stopped the wheel. Lifted the clay off gently.

 

“Fire makes everything true,” he said.

“A crack before the kiln is a mercy.

A crack after means you’ve lied to yourself.”

 

He handed me my half-shaped jar.

 

It was crooked. But I couldn’t tell if it was the clay or my hands that had faltered.

 

Later that evening, I found him asleep in his chair with Aru curled in his lap, both of them breathing in the same rhythm. The half-finished jar sat nearby, drying in the late light.

 

That night, Meera placed it by the door.

 

“Don’t fix it yet,” she said.

 

“Why not?”

 

She looked at it. At me.

 

“Let it harden.

Let it tell you what kind of thing it is.”

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XII.

​

It was Meera who mentioned him first.

 

We were eating mango slices on the veranda, Aru asleep with his mouth open, one hand still clenched around a piece of string. The sun was low, dragging long gold across the courtyard. The flies had grown bold.

 

“There’s a man building a boat,” she said, absently.

 

I looked up. “In the river?”

 

She shook her head. “In his house.”

 

I laughed. “Is he mad?”

 

She shrugged. “He’s old.”

 

That was the end of it—or so I thought.

 

A few days later, I passed his hut on my way to the kiln. The door was open. Inside, the floor had been cleared of furniture. A frame of thick wooden ribs curved from wall to wall like the skeleton of something waiting to be remembered.

 

He was sanding one of the planks with slow, methodical care. His hands moved like they were tracing something already finished.

 

I stood in the doorway for a while.

 

He didn’t greet me. Didn’t pause. Just looked up once and said,

“Water comes where it is owed.”

 

Then he returned to his work.

 

Later, I asked Govind, the oldest man in the village, about him.

 

“That’s Hari,” he said, chewing betel. “Widowed. Doesn’t speak much since the fever took his daughters. Used to be a fisherman, before the river swallowed his nets.”

 

“Has he done this before?”

 

“Built a boat?”

 

“No. Waited for something that isn’t coming.”

 

Govind spat into the dust. “Everyone here does that.”

 

A few children began hanging around his hut, whispering theories. Some said he’d had a vision. Others said he was building it for the gods. One girl swore she saw him talking to birds.

 

Aru asked me if we could visit. I told him no.

 

“He’s not building it for us,” I said.

 

Aru thought about this for a moment, then nodded solemnly—the way children do when they’re not sure they understand, but feel they should pretend they do.

 

After that, we all went on pretending.

 

We fetched water. We told stories. We folded clothes.

 

And in the center of a dry village,

a boat grew.

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Continue to Part 5

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