XIII.

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Aru disappeared on the second day of the rains.

 

It began like any other monsoon morning: the smell of wet soil, the frogs calling from hidden places, water threading down the thatch roof in silver ribbons. Meera had tied her hair up in a scarf and was kneading dough when she noticed the silence.

 

“Where’s Aru?” she asked.

 

I looked toward the corner where he usually played with his bits of string and clay beads. The bowl was overturned. The mat was empty.

 

“He was just here,” I said, standing.

 

We searched the hut first. Then the courtyard. Then the neighboring houses.

 

Nothing.

 

By the time the potter joined us, limping through puddles with his hands shaking, the village had already begun to murmur.

 

Meera’s face had gone cold. Still. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. She simply moved—from house to house, calling his name, her voice growing smaller each time.

 

“Aru,” I shouted, pacing in widening circles.

 

No answer.

 

A woman near the well said she’d seen him walking toward the trees. Another said she saw him near the canal. A third swore she saw him talking to Hari—the old man with the boat.

 

I ran there. Burst into his hut without asking.

 

The boat had grown larger. It filled the space like a sleeping beast. Hari stood beside it, hammer in hand.

 

“I’m looking for my son,” I said.

 

He didn’t answer. Just stared at me, eyes steady.

 

“Did he come here?”

 

“Not for me,” Hari said. “Not yet.”

 

I left without another word.

 

The rain fell harder. It was past noon.

 

Govind organized a search. Men scattered into the fields, the riverbanks, the trees. Meera refused to stay home. Her scarf soaked through. Her feet slipped in the mud.

 

By evening, people were lighting lamps—not for prayer, but for light, as if the darkness might give something back.

 

Then, just before nightfall, someone shouted from the far end of the canal.

 

We ran.

 

He was there.

 

Aru.

 

Sitting in the curve of a washed-out gully, shivering, covered in mud and mosquito bites. His hands clutched a little raft of sticks and string, half-crumbled from the rain.

 

Meera dropped to her knees. Pulled him to her chest. Said his name three times, then fainted.

 

I carried them both home.

 

That night, he said nothing. Just lay between us, awake, staring at the roof, his small hands opening and closing.

 

When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.

 

“I was waiting,” he said.

 

“For what?” I asked.

 

He didn’t answer.

​

​

XIV.

​

Years passed like weather—noticeable only when they changed.

 

Aru grew tall. His voice deepened. His hair curled more tightly when it rained. He no longer slept between us but now on a mat of his own, where he would lie for hours staring at the ceiling, lips moving silently as if reciting conversations from dreams.

 

He had taken to making kites—delicate, spined with bamboo and stitched from old sari scraps. Some were shaped like birds, others like eyes. He’d let them loose on windless days, claiming the sky just needed coaxing. When one finally rose, he’d whisper something to it, then let the string slip from his fingers.

 

The potter’s limp worsened. He taught fewer apprentices but made more cups—tiny ones, the kind no one used but everyone admired.

 

“If the gods ever return,” he said once, “they’ll want tea.”

 

Meera began to hum when she worked. Always the same tune. Wordless, lilting—a song she’d never admit to knowing.

 

Our lives had shape now.

 

Aru fetched water from the well. I worked with the grain merchants during the dry months and the ferrymen during the rains. Meera became the quiet center of everything—called to births, to funerals, to disputes about boundary stones.

 

No one asked if I was from here anymore.

 

I was.

 

There were good days—harvests that came early, festivals with extra oil for lamps, and a rooster the would follow the temple priest everywhere, as if awaiting instruction.

 

And there were bad ones—a stomach sickness that passed through the village like smoke, a fire that claimed three huts and nearly a fourth. Once, a baby was born with no cry. Meera held it longer than anyone else, as if her silence could teach it how.

 

Through it all, time thickened. Our steps slowed. The river changed course slightly one year, and everyone pretended not to notice.

 

We spoke of building a new room for Aru.

Of planting neem instead of tamarind.

Of buying a second goat.

 

The days were not remarkable.

But they were ours.

 

And somewhere at the edge of all this—quietly, steadily—

a boat waited in the shadows of a hut.

 

Still unfinished.

Still growing.

​

​

XV.

​

The day the potter handed me his tools, it wasn’t a ceremony.

 

He didn’t say he was done. He didn’t call it a gift.

He simply set his hands on the wheel and said,

“Your turn.”

 

Then he walked away.

 

By then, his fingers had grown stiff. His eyes had begun to miss the details. The last pot he’d fired was lopsided, the base too thin. But he’d laughed when it cracked and said it was just proving it had character.

 

I began slowly.

 

Fixing his old kiln. Cleaning the shed. Sorting through shelves of discarded glazes and forgotten molds.

 

Meera helped. She kept the books, bartered for clay, argued with the men who delivered it, and never once let them charge more than they had the week before.

 

Aru carved small patterns into the pots—birds, leaves, strange creatures he refused to name.

 

We became known for them.

 

People came from other villages to buy them. They said the patterns changed when you turned them in the light.

 

We hired two apprentices. Built a second wheel. Fired the kiln twice a week, sometimes three.

 

The clay was good that year—red and heavy.

It made deep-sounding pots, the kind that held silence even when empty.

 

I found myself waking before dawn. Wanting to feel the weight of the earth between my hands. Wanting to shape something that might last longer than I would.

 

Once, while trimming a vase, I caught Meera watching me from the doorway.

 

“You’ve become him,” she said.

 

“Who?”

 

She nodded toward her father, asleep in the shade with his legs tucked up like a child’s.

 

“The man who taught you the wheel.”

 

I looked at my hands. They were calloused. Burned.

Stained with red dust that wouldn’t wash out.

 

She was right.

 

But I didn’t say so.

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Continue to Part 6

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