1941- Calcutta, Bengal, British India  

The grey, translucent pockets of sky rise disperse for me, slower at first then all at once. I peer at first- only shadows- that of stray cats and early risers.  

He hasn’t been here in months, I- only a night . I appeared to be following him that day, our trajectories lined up - his slow, cautious steps up the stairs tailed by growing shadows.  

There’s less of them now, the red coats turned a camouflage green, the black cylindrical hats tied at the chin replaced with caps, rifle at belt. He finds them, the soldiers, disconcerting here, you can tell by the way he stands straighter- more alert, his eyes so ready to look down, I, however, find them usual.  

“How much for one?”, he stops at the side of a mud staircase, hand reaching into the inside pocket of his coat. There- roses in bouquets, before a crouched figure in an array of blankets- a woman, I think, or a very old man.  

They eye him, two beady eyes implanted on browning, muddy skin observe his stature, his leather shoes and ironed grey trousers. They exist in their stills for a moment, frozen- him looking down and the poor, downtrodden thing looking up.  

He starts to shuffle, hand reaching into his hair, adjusting his glasses with the other, readjusting his posture. As I approach him, staring a tad too long, sweat beads form on his forehead and neck.  

Now in my full view, he falters, shoulders crouching, voice a few octaves lower and he asks again, somehow the curvature of his lips looking more relaxed: “Can I have one?”  

The little thing loses interest, handing a bouquet over, accepting a little bundle of coins he hands in return.  

Once out of its sight however, his stature sharpens, somehow less confident now, even with his leather shoes thumping on the softened ground.  

I don’t follow people. People don’t walk slow enough. Following the trail of exports is inevitable.  

Kolkata doesn’t get all of me. I don’t get to see all of it- the basement cellars, crowding prisons or slums, too many colourful places with too many limbs- barred by blankets and walls.  

Here- I am something of a demarcation line between time zones. I never set here. Not on the British Empire.  

1940- Darjeeling, Bengal, British India  

There was a pounding in Masha’s head and all she could see was the warm glow across the room. There were hands gripping the sides of her face and more hands across her back.  

Was someone trying to help her?  

She began to feel an icy sort of thing on her chest. She wanted to breathe, she wanted to leave this, whatever it was. It was like she was trying to get out of a cage, yet where were the bars? Her skin was burning or seething or prickly, she wasn’t sure because all she wanted to do was get out of it.  

“I need to get out”, she heard herself saying.  

Someone’s hands gripped the sides of her face. She couldn’t piece together a face from the blurs of patchwork in her vision.  

“It’s not like last time”, she heard herself saying. There used to be blissful euphoria, a senseless sort of sleep that woke you from the drenching days of campering down floors to cleaning in this big house and that. This time, it passed - like the blink of eyelids before a series of visions attacked her, a series of bullets incapacitated her ears.  

“It was too much-”, someone else replied.  

A loud scream pierced the air in the villa’s entrance. It was the scream a man gives before you cut his throat - knife clean from the jugular to the spine.  

It was raining. Fresh rain in the harvest season. Not monsoon rain, as the scenario would deem, but rain so soft that you won’t feel the need to squint your eyes in fear of the water dropping on your eyelids.  

Masha looked up from the tray of rice grains she was sorting just in time as the others of the household gathered to pinpoint the source of the shriek.  

It was a man. White kurta- not the ones in funerals, but a garish sort of white as though he’d wear it to work in a mid-tier printing press. His knees were pressing into the ground and had his hands not also been on the ground arching his upper body away from it, one would believe that he was praying. But he wasn’t praying. Dead men walking do not pray.  

“Anwar!”, a woman yelled from the corner house, Masha recognised her, but she didn’t know her- perhaps a relative or a tenant farmer who’d been there from Masha’s birth.  

She struggled over on her aged feet, tripping over her sari’s achal, getting back up again. “Anwar, get out of here”, she spoke, standing firm, breathing heavy.  

He seemed to be clawing the ground. The edges of his lips contorted, like he was holding back a scream- he screamed again.  

His eyes were too red rimmed for tears, skin a pasty sort of brown colour.  

He’s in pain, Masha thought. No, we’re all in pain, she corrected her thought- he’s just weak.  

The men gathered around Anwar’s form, arms under his shoulder, dragging the shell of a man, Anwar’s ghostly body, to his home.  

No one told Masha why Anwar was there. No one told Masha anything.  

She later discovered that his wife had passed. Doctors stretched for miles. By the time Anwar's wife had delivered their stillborn child, her internal organs had bled out. She had bled out. Motionless. Lifeless, Masha imagined - she would never know. They would never let her near a birthing.  

Days passed and Anwar showed from his home back in the array of villa-like huts. He seemed unshaven, his black hair littered in more whites than a man his age should have. He wore a shoulder bag, a brown suit and open sandals suited for the heat and still looked as though he worked at a mid-tier printing press.  

The first time there were marches and butchering on the streets, and the driving out of the red coated men, she wasted in the crumbles of a back alley until her sister rescued her from the magnanimous glamour of colour from poppy seeded bliss. The second time, soon after, she was locked behind the wooden windows behind grills and locked doors. Food came thrice a day and prayer beads were passed under the door handle. They wouldn’t let her work again - in someone’s house, with someone’s child- be anywhere away from here.  

It wasn’t going to get better. She’d stand here, stranded.  

No one.  

1945 - Calcutta, Bengal, British India  

A few more steps, a few more curdling rounds of the skin of her feet printing against the leather sandals, digging into the mud. A few more people in line until the warm soaky rice entered the hearth of her mouth, until her teeth curdled the dhal.  

As the people shifted up the line, the girl did too, shrouded from halfway down her head and around her shoulders in a fraying, white shawl.  

She got to the line. Accepted the serving in her bowl, not looking the thinning man in the eyes.  

It wasn’t cold anymore. Cold reaches a point of no return when hunger subdues the skin to no longer feel cold. But if she took off the shawl she felt as though she would fall out, her limbs would not hold onto her skeleton, holding her standing long enough to eat.  

Pushed with the crowd of bodies, she found her way to a corner of a building.  

Her fingers, hastily wiped on the edge of her shawl entered the bowl, scooping up almost half of it in one go.  

She stopped herself.  

She closed her eyes. The warm smell of rice carried her back to the image of her mother, body whole in its shape sitting at the edge of a fishing lake.  

The dhal soaked rice entered her mouth and the sizzling of oil hitting the entrance of food echoed in her mind.  

An image of a kitchen - she hadn’t seen a fire peering out of the ground stove in days. It had only been a week since she had lowered a small figure wrapped in white into a grave with six others for the Earth to swallow.  

The food stopped in its tracks down her oesophagus, tightening in her throat. She opened her eyes.  

A burning scent of beef and charcoal worked their way up her nostrils, except it wasn’t beef. Her mouth watered regardless, unable to stop her feet she followed the smoke out of her alcove of a corner on the ground.  

She stepped a few paces forward before she stopped again.  

The sunlight hit the place where the smoke omitted just enough for her to see the procession of people dressed in white.  

The rice churned in her stomach, rising up her mouth. She clenched down her teeth, determined not to let the food out.  

It fought her, slapped the ends of her nostrils. It won.  

She watched the entrails of yellow rice cover the brown ground before the crematorium.  

1943- Calcutta, Bengal, British India  

I had underestimated the traffic and congestion of midday street side stalls, hordes of human feet, factory smoke and the odd taxi and horse drawn that braved movement in such a cluster.  

“Saheb, not this way”, my rickshaw driver mutters- normally I would argue, but the crowd seems unrelenting.  

As he dismounts his seat, turning our carriage away, I catch a glimpse of a group headed in the single direction of a truck unloading its supplies. The purpose at which the group walks has me cold- as cold as one can be in an Indian winter - bereft of dryness and instead filled with water particles clinging to whatever sweat glands existed on the human body.  

There was a drive recently, for breastmilk. A shipment of aid from other parts of India. But a bigger shipment had left the dock, of rice, wheat and uniforms folded into shipment boxes.  

The boys in the newsroom had been talking about it for weeks. The series of telegrams and letters that went from Calcutta to Leo Amery’s, the secretary of state’s, office was ludicrous. But what else could have been done? The foodlines in Burma were disturbed, they needed 5 stocks elsewhere, the War was so close to sight…  

In the new alleyway there are less people, there are also less people in shirts and pants which have me holding onto the sides of the rickshaw slightly tighter.  

People line the streets, like dots in white and grey apparel. Women in white - widows, I had been told.  

Someone falls in front of the rickshaw and at the pace we are going, I fly forwards on my seat, only stopped by the hands that grab onto the side rails like glue.  

A sudden crowd forms from the dispersed bodies struggling to make out words around us.  

A child lies at the front of the wheel and while I fumble in the cold air through banknotes, relief washes over me as I notice that we have not touched the little bundle. Other children approach us. Their bellies are swollen , their arms thin - I had never known that hunger could cause bellies to swell.  

More people surround us. White clothing on dark skin, bare chested skeletons of men and women and my eyes finally note the empty people with wide eyes dug into their hollow faces leaning on the walls of buildings around the street.  

I don’t understand what they are saying.  

But I smell the stench of sewer in their breaths. The way breath becomes when your insides start to reek, decompose of their own volition, no food between the layer of already digested, unwilling to leave bits.  

The cold, humid air in broad daylight feels more sinister than ever.  

I cannot understand the words they speak but I know what they are asking for. What their breath smells of.  

Food.  

They stare with empty mouths and rounded, full bellies.  

They are shrouded amongst each other, as though their bones will betray what their bodies can no longer give them; warmth.  

This is not a war. As their bony corpse-like hands grab onto my shoes and limbs, I wish I had gone to the war.