From what I can remember, Chaiji said, those days were mostly about waiting. The radio worked sometimes only, the newspaperwallah was late every day, and then eventually he stopped coming at all. Neighbours also, the Owaisi family on the left and the Prasads on the right, hardly anyone went out any more, so there was no chance to hear anything from them and we were all too nervous to knock on their doors. I was so busy always, because Kamala never lifted a finger to help me, nor did anyone else, but somehow all I can remember was waiting, watching the street, for something to happen, I didn’t know what.

It was—and here she drew an invisible line in the air, pursing her lips—it was totally silent, all through that time. There were thousands of people living in the village, and all the time it was noisy, people shouting and talking and laughing, animals walking around. The place had become a madhouse, but then in those several days the streets were completely empty. Someone had picked everyone up and taken them away, flown them over the hills and left our town bare, swept clean of the people that lived there. In the following weeks I looked back and wished that it really had happened, that we all could have been carried out towards the horizon by some invisible force, or even that we had just vanished into the dry earth completely, into the cracks that ruptured the soil in the summertime. But at that time I was just nervous and confused, I think we all were.

We spent all of our time indoors, the smoke from the stove swimming in loopy circles around my head as I rolled out an endless procession of chapatis to fill the time. That girl Kamala stuffed herself while peeling the occasional potato, that was her great contribution, while Ajay had had no work for days, the post office being closed, and moped around the house, his shirt sagging around his shoulders as he stooped, his body forming the shape of a meandering question mark. The heat inside the house built during the day, so that talk dissipated along with our energy and you could feel the air going down your throat as you breathed, until the short burst of rain that came every afternoon swept the suffocation away, leaving a pungent dampness rising from the earth. Kamala used to watch the falling water through the window and say that it left everything shining like a diamond. When had she ever even seen a diamond, that’s what I wanted to ask. But I never said so, and she kept watching the rain, her eyes slanting upward towards the sky and its swollen black clouds, draped like winter shawls over the horizon.

On the fourth or fifth day, Chaiji said, I saw Ram Prasad, Ritesh Prasad’s son, from the kirana shop, walking down the road towards us. He was the first person I had seen on our street in days. I remember the heat made the air above the dirt road shimmer, so that his silhouette was completely black against the sunlight, and his movements seemed jerky and strange, as if he were being stung by scorpions. The dust rose behind his shoes, detaching from the ground and colouring the air brown behind him as he dragged one foot, askew, lagging behind the other. His arms hung listlessly about him, and I could see his dull blue khadi shirt, open at the front, with scars and large red stains spreading all over him. He passed the peepal tree behind the low clay wall that ran alongside our street, looking up towards the horizon at nothing in particular, I think, because his eyes were fixed ahead, as if on some invisible ghost or demon. He walked like this, dragging himself, for only a few minutes before he fell, forward, like a tree falls, heavily and in a long, curving line.

The dust rose from the ground as he landed, and then he shifted his leg slightly and then he was still.

I ran out on to the road, forgetting where I was, what I was supposed to be doing. I could hear Kamala calling out behind me, but somehow the sound went past my ears and dissipated in the dusty air. As I knelt on the ground over Ram Prasad, I felt the sun like a knife against my neck, pressing down upon me through the thin cloth that covered my head. Ram Prasad was badly injured; he’d been attacked, and there were deep gashes in his chest and across his shoulders, and he was bruised and beaten about the head. We’d all been waiting, Chaiji said, for something like this to happen. But I didn’t think I’d see it, smell it, so close to myself, to my own body and my own mind. It’s so hot, it’s so hot, Ram Prasad kept whispering, but he wouldn’t drink the water I was pressing to his lips, carried in a copper pot I had apparently, somehow, picked up as I crossed the threshold of the house. I kept looking at his matted hair, one tiny lock of which clung to his forehead, the size and shape of a baby’s finger, smeared with sweat and dried blood. He breathed hard for a few minutes, maybe. Looking back, it might have been longer than that, I couldn’t feel time passing. I knew Kamala would be hiding herself behind the windowsill, too afraid to come out, watching with the cloth of her dupatta bunched up in her hand, invariably crumpling the fabric to her mouth. But for those few minutes, or longer, I held Ram Prasad the way I held your grandfather, and your father, and all the rest of them, resting against my lap, in a perfect arc, so that his head didn’t touch the ground. Then he—Ram Prasad, I mean, she said—he died, letting out a coughing, rattling sound. It seemed as if he was laughing at himself, at what had happened to him. His face contorted horribly. I promise you, I’ve never seen something like it.

When I picture that afternoon, she said, somehow, all I can really think about, or see most vividly, is Ram Prasad’s body. After Kamala dragged me back into the house, pulling me by my clothes away from him, leaving him alone on his side in the sun, crumpled and lopsided like an old newspaper, I sat in the house, my vision blurring, listening to Kamala’s distended expressions of grief and anger, telling me I had put them all at risk—what if someone had seen me, what if I’d given away our presence inside the house, that kind of thing. But in my mind I was really thinking about Ram Prasad. I hadn’t known him very well; only as the man who sold us flour, dal, salt, that kind of thing, and yet I kept thinking about him, filling in his image, the clothes he wore, the way his voice sounded. He was—she traced her hand through a patch of air, drawing a rough silhouette with her fingers—quite tall, thin, with a raspy voice. He kept talking about wanting to move to Lahore, make it big, with a kirana chain that would, he said, end up with him buying a car and driving us all around the village—me and Kamala in the back, he said, and at least three or four children could fit in the front. I had seen a car only once or twice; the thought of being in one myself was too much, it was a wild leap of the imagination. I had laughed and dismissed Ram Prasad, and he’d responded with that self-effacing grin of his, Chaiji said, but still, I had been excited. The stools in our house were tough and hard, and I’d heard that seats inside cars were soft like wheat chaff.

Later in the day, I saw, he was still lying there. No one had dared come pick him up. I didn’t know where his family was, I didn’t know where anyone was. I could see his blood, which had stopped draining from inside him, pooled by his side. I couldn’t stop looking. You know when ghee starts to congeal in the wintertime? From runny yellow liquid to that thick, unevenly coloured, lumpy paste? That’s what it was like. His blood. No one cleaned it up, all through the afternoon or the next day. But that’s how it was, then, people just let things lie. There would be too much to clean, otherwise. The whole town had grown filthy. Filthy people, with I don’t know what rubbish cluttering their minds.

She was silent for a few minutes, while I refilled her glass of dark chai and shut the tall glass window behind us, through which the evening rain and lengthening shadows were beginning to fall, bringing with them the metallic smell of the traffic and food carts on the street outside.

So what were we to do? she continued, abruptly. Ajay said that they’d kill all of us, that we’d all end up like Ram Prasad, lying sideways in the dust, like a fallen tree branch. Kamala, to no one’s surprise, had nothing to contribute—she just wanted to cover her eyes and shriek and talk endlessly about hiding inside the house for weeks on end. That wasn’t possible at all, Chaiji said, because where would we get rations from now that there was no Ram Prasad, now that he had proved that we couldn’t go outside safely at all? I was worried for the Owaisis next door—she furrowed her brow, narrowed her eyes, as if still wondering what she could do—and I knew there would be trouble for them too, maybe, since everyone was still living together in the same neighbourhoods at that time. Now we don’t even live in the same country, of course. But on the day we left, theirs was the only place we stopped at as we ran. I promise, we went to check. They had gone, it was empty, but we still went to see, because we wanted them to be safe. They were our own neighbours, after all. She seemed desperate to tell me this, gripping my hand hard with hers, looking with wide eyes into mine, nodding her head vigorously, as if I had the slightest authority to believe or disbelieve what she was saying.

Later that day I pushed open the gate of our house, she said, the black iron gate that we used to have in those days. The three of us, me, Ajay and Kamala, we walked up the road towards town, leaving Ram Prasad in the sun behind us, cast in green shadow by the leaves of the peepal tree. We could see the smoke to the west, a column of it—they must have reached Wazirabad by then. I heard later that ten or fifteen people were left alive in the whole village, which was far larger than ours. Kamala and Ajay were sad to leave, Kamala was hysterical, Chaiji said, clinging on to the threshold of the house with her fingernails and all kinds of rubbish. I don’t know why they were upset, I still don’t. The ground was being pulled away from our feet as if it were a Mirzapur dhurrie. They should have been grateful to me. I was the one who decided, she said. I was the one who said—let’s leave, now, to the railway station, to leave the village behind us and get away while we still could. They should be grateful now, and not think so much about all those old things. Of course I don’t want to go back. We were pushed out. They can keep the village, she said, waving her hand dismissively. They can keep it all, it doesn’t bother me. What does bother me, every day or at least once in a while, is that we left Ram Prasad there in the street. Someone should have picked him up, done what was necessary. We left him there, and that was wrong, Chaiji said, jabbing her finger into the small wooden table that squatted between us. Our cups trembled with the force, and the liquid inside, quaking, rushed towards the rim before flooding back to the centre and settling into a still, brown circle, cooling ever faster with the night air.

• Tags: Aditya Narayan Sharma, fiction, Free to read, India