She was given a kind farewell. Gulnar kissed her cheeks, and the children hugged her and offered both her and Jeevan a little food to take with them. It wasn’t easily spared, and Bhumika would have liked to refuse.
She thanked them instead, and professed real pleasure in the small gifts of dried fruit and seeds. Let them have their pride. They deserved it.
The forest felt different in the aftermath of the flooding. Stranger, and unfamiliar. Many trees had fallen, leaving the wet ground bare. The birds and insects, so loud before, were silent.
They crossed the bridge and walked between the trees.
Her time snared in the village by the flood had felt like a respite—from her ghosts, from her knowledge, from the weight of her task. But that time was over, so it did not surprise her that once they had crossed the bridge, her watchers appeared again. She felt them before she saw them: a churning of water in her heart and her skull that made her lower her head from the heaviness of their presence.
When she raised her head, there they were: a dozen figures, young and old, mottled with water. In the sunlight their edges were hazy and soft.
She felt as if she were underwater too—floating, unable to control her limbs. She distantly heard Jeevan call her name as one figure walked toward her.
“Will you drink?”
A figure had stepped forward. Slim and small—maybe a child.
“You must,” the watcher insisted. “Just a taste.”
Fingertips touched her lips. A single drop of water—green as leaves. No more than that.
She felt new knowledge in shards. A warmth in her belly, squirming; a golden egg splintering open; life and life and life blooming and being born; and an ancient and new thing stirring beneath the soil, sap seeping from its root-gnarled flesh as its eyes slowly, inexorably peeled open.
“Bhumika.”
She returned to herself. The world around her swam for a moment, until her vision settled and she knew her body once more. Jeevan was holding her steady, his hands warm, eyes worried.
“Something is wrong,” she said. “Let me go, Jeevan.”
He released her, near-vibrating with tension, and she kneeled on the ground and pressed a hand to the earth.
Her ghosts watched, water swirling from them.
One shard struck her again—
Grief welled up in her, as it had when she’d heard a child crying so long ago. But now her grief wasn’t alien or formless. That droplet of strange water had carried something in it—laughter, and a life inside her, and the desolation that losing it had left behind.
She could hear Jeevan’s breathing and it made her grief swell, somehow. She couldn’t help but speak.
“The child I gave birth to,” Bhumika said. “Was it yours?”
He stilled. “The child,” he repeated.
“I’ve seen my own body, a time or two,” she said. The hand she hadn’t pressed to soil was curled against her stomach. She’d mapped the marks on her skin with her hands, silver where she’dbeen reshaped, not hollowed but molded to cradle another heartbeat, another life. The water she’d drunk had only clarified what she already knew.
“No,” he said, finally. “She was not my daughter.”
She. A daughter.
“Is she still alive?”
“Yes,” Jeevan said immediately—eyes suddenly soft. “Yes, Bhumika.”
She nodded. A jerky, wordless nod.
“Good,” she said. She swallowed around the sharpness in her own throat—a feeling like glass. “That’s good.”
She splayed her hand more firmly against the ground.
