When she came last night, things felt different. We sat by the open doors of the balcony, overlooking the street below, with the sound of the bouzouki and a sky full of stars. It was chilly and she had a throw wrapped around her. She was quieter than usual, as if there was something on her mind, but then she started telling me a story about her grandfather and how he’d ended up with a glass eye.
Nisha was in the middle of saying, ‘。 . . and then he chased him with a baseball bat . . .’ when I placed the ring in front of her on the table.
She looked down at it, then picked it up and put it, not on her finger, but on her open palm. She was gazing down at it so I couldn’t see her eyes, just the soft darkness of her lids and lashes.
‘Will you marry me, Nisha?’ I asked.
She said nothing.
‘I’ve had the ring for a while. I wanted to ask you this summer . . .’ I paused there, as I couldn’t finish the sentence: I couldn’t bring myself to remind her of what had happened just two short months earlier. ‘。 . . and then you were so heartbroken.’
She nodded.
‘But I meant everything I said.’
She looked up at me. Straight lips. Hard eyes.
She didn’t believe me.
‘We can still do all of the things we were going to do. We can still go together to Sri Lanka, back to your home. You can be with Kumari. We can have a family.’
‘I fell in love with you as soon as I saw you.’ Her voice was barely a whisper.
I tried to remember the first time she’d seen me. What had I been doing? What had she seen in me in that moment? ‘But I loved my husband too.’ Then the muscles of her jaw clenched, her shoulders and body stiffened. She closed her fingers around the ring, tightening her fist, possessing it.
Without a further word, without a yes or a no, she walked towards the back door that led to the stone staircase.
‘What was I doing when you first saw me?’ I asked.
She stopped in her tracks, but did not turn around. ‘Feeding the chickens.’
‘Feeding the chickens?’
She didn’t reply. Instead, she turned and looked at me over her shoulder, and then said, ‘You see, I thought you were a different person.’
She didn’t sit in the boat that night; she went straight to bed.
*
Around 11 p.m. I expected to hear Nisha’s gentle tapping on the back door, but it didn’t come. Sunday was one of the nights she usually called Kumari, so I was sure she would appear. She always spoke to her very early in the morning because of the time difference, and she liked to do it at my place due to the fact that I had a tablet and she wanted to be able to see Kumari while she spoke to her. Before she met me, she had talked to Kumari on the phone. To give her some privacy, I would sit out on the balcony and wait for her to finish.
However, she told me once that it was also her way of keeping the two worlds of her life apart, separate but in harmony at the same time.
‘What did you mean by that?’ I’d asked her one night, when she’d finished the call with Kumari. I came back inside and she crawled into bed with me.
‘Well,’ she’d replied, ‘downstairs at Petra’s I am nanny to Aliki. But when I come up here – and everyone is asleep and there are no demands of me – I remember who I really am. I can be a real mother to my own daughter.’
Now, I made myself a coffee and sat on the balcony and listened to the sound of the bouzouki. I took the little bird from the container and sat holding it in my palms. It took a bit of convincing to get it to stay there, but then it slept, breathing slowly, steadily, its tiny body expanding and releasing. When it woke up, I gave it water, drop by drop, until it didn’t want any more.
An hour passed and still there was no sign of her. At midnight, I decided to go downstairs and knock on her bedroom door.
On the last step, something got tangled in my feet – one of the stray cats, the black one, the one with the differentcoloured eyes. I lost my balance and grabbed on to a small garden table to stop myself from falling. The table tipped and from it fell an old ceramic money-box that belonged to Petra. It smashed on the ground, the coins spilling out, and when I saw the light of Petra’s room turn on, I rushed back up the stairs, closing the door gently.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t stop thinking about Nisha.
Where had she disappeared to?
Had I scared her away?
You see, I thought you were a different person.
I sat on the balcony with the bird for the rest of the night, until the sun began to rise behind the buildings to the east. Far away, I imagined the sun’s rays lighting up the sea. And the little bird filled its lungs and began to sing.