When she found out she was pregnant, Mahesh ran around the neighbourhood calling out, ‘I’m going to be a father!’ Then he came home sweating, beaming from ear to ear, pacing the kitchen, making plans.
One day, months later, after she had just given birth to Kumari, Nisha was in the kitchen breastfeeding the baby. Hearing a noise, she looked up and saw someone through the window, running and tripping as she went. It was one of her neighbours, a woman named Shehara, running through the fields, shouting something that at first Nisha could not understand. Then her voice flowed in through the open doors: ‘It has caved in! It has caved in! It has caved in!’
She shouted this over and over again, until the words lost all meaning. It has caved. In it has caved. It has caved in it has caved in it has caved in it has.
Nisha understood immediately what had happened. The very thing her husband had always feared. It was why Nisha had prayed every night from that very first day when they spoke in the shade of the trees. Mahesh was stuck down there in the deep, dank well with no way out. She knew him so well that she could almost hear the beat of his heart, feel the blood pumping in his veins. She could hear the dripping water, see the dripping walls, the shimmering crystals in the light of his head torch. She could smell it – the earth. The earth that produced such beautiful gems, the earth that held such brilliant colours, had now swallowed him up.
*
Nisha stopped her story there. She could not go on. She sat up and began coughing, as if she was the one trapped in the mine, struggling for breath.
I got up and brought her a glass of cold water. She took a few sips and handed it back to me.
‘I can’t tell any more,’ she said, eventually. ‘My tears are going into my throat and choking me.’
It was so hot that night. We were on the bed with the fan blowing on us and the patio doors wide open. Once again, Nisha lay on her back, placing her hands on her stomach. All the lost futures drifted through Nisha into me. I felt sorrow for the lost child. I had a feeling of crying internally; I recognised it from when I was a boy, when my father had returned with blood in his eyes trapped in the visions and sounds of the war, never seeing me again. He made me a desk with fresh oak from the woods. He placed the desk away from the window so that I couldn’t look out. He became obsessed with my education. I was no longer allowed to roam around and look at the birds and wildlife. I could no longer go with them to the market. He wanted me to study. He checked in on me. If he saw me standing by the window, he closed the blinds.
It was this thought: that loss cannot be reversed, that I could not bring back my father’s lost mind, or the child that – this lack of control, this helplessness – made my hand tremble over Nisha’s.
‘I wish it could have been safe inside me,’ she said.
‘You know it was not your fault,’ I said.
‘I do know.’
She looked up at the night sky, through the window. The moon was not visible, only stars. I placed my palm over her hands and we stayed like that for a long time.
I thought about the dying man in the gem-filled darkness of the mine. How long would it have taken him to die? Did he have time to sit in the dark and think about his life, his wife, his baby daughter up above, about all the things he loved and those that he hated, about his triumphs and regrets? What would he have felt, meeting the inescapability of death before it had arrived? What kind of hunger did he feel? What thirst? What pains plagued his body? What memories his mind? Or was he so panicked that his death came faster?
‘But I didn’t know what his favourite colour was,’ I heard her say.
*
Still cradling the owlet in my palms, I went to the balcony and saw that Petra and Aliki were having dinner with Ruba and Ms Hadjikyriacou in her front yard. This was a good time for me to go to the garden. I took a spade and buried the owlet in the soft soil beneath the orange tree. I buried it deep so that cats and wild animals could not get to it. Then I sat on the balcony holding the little bird, who had nestled deep into its feathers, and I listened to the laughter and endless chatter down below.
*
At exactly 5 a.m. the iPad rang again. I answered it. Kumari stared back at me, confused. Once again, she was in her school uniform, purple rucksack on her shoulders. This time her hair was down, straight as needles.
‘Hello, Mr Yiannis,’ she said.
‘Hello, Kumari.’
‘Can I speak to Amma?’
I paused for only a second: I didn’t want her to pick up on my anxiety.
‘I’m sorry, Kumari, your mum is at work again.’