# The Refugee's God: Three The morning had turned pale and thin. Ritwik sat in his small room—no, not a room really, a corner of the verandah that his landlord had partitioned off with a blue tarpaulin and a bamboo frame. Through the gaps, he could see the street: vendors setting up their carts, a boy chasing a goat, the slow accumulation of the day's noise. He was supposed to work. There were papers to sort at the NGO office, grant applications that wouldn't write themselves. But his mind had come unmoored again. It was like this sometimes—a drift, a loosening. The world would seem very far away, or he would seem very far from it. He couldn't decide which. The letter lay on his lap. He'd read it three times already, though there was nothing new in it to discover. It was from his sister in Kolkata, written on the back of old newspaper, the way she always wrote. *Mother isn't eating well. She asks about you. The house feels too quiet now.* The house. That word carried weight—the weight of rooms he'd walked through barefoot as a boy, the weight of silences that were never truly silent because they were full of the breathing of people you loved. He folded the letter carefully along its creases. There was a sound from the street. A woman's voice, raised in that particular tone that meant either joy or tremendous sorrow. Ritwik had learned to recognize the difference. This one was sorrow. He stood and looked out. An old woman was sitting on the ground near the vegetable seller's cart. Her grandson—Ritwik had seen him before, a thin boy of perhaps twelve—was squatting beside her, looking lost. The vegetables lay scattered. A basket had overturned. Ritwik put on his sandals. --- By the time he reached them, a small crowd had gathered. In cities like this one—a city of perpetual crossing, of people who'd come from somewhere and were always thinking about somewhere else—crowds formed easily. Someone brought water. Someone else brought a stool. An old man who smelled of bidi smoke began to tell a story about his own mother, a story no one had asked for and everyone pretended to listen to anyway. The woman's name was Savitri. She had come from a village three districts away to stay with her grandson while his parents worked in the city. She had slipped on something—water, oil, the accumulated negligence of a morning—and fallen hard. "I can't get up," she kept saying. "I can't get up." But this was only partially about the fall. Ritwik sat with her while someone called for a taxi, while the crowd slowly dispersed back into their own mornings. The grandson held his grandmother's hand. He was very young to be holding such weight. "Where are you from?" Savitri asked him. He almost lied. It would have been easier. "Bangladesh," he said. "Originally." She nodded as if this explained something. "I thought so. Your face has that look. My husband was from the east. Before Partition, before all this business." She paused, and he could see her working through pain to get the words out. "Do you ever go back?" "No," Ritwik said. "Neither did he. He died thinking he would. Men are like that. They keep their going like a secret, something they might do tomorrow." She squeezed her grandson's hand. "I came here because my daughter-in-law sent for me. She said, *Come, Mother, help me with the house, help me with the boy.* But what she meant was, *Come, because I'm frightened. Come, because sometimes a woman needs her mother.* Even when she's too old to be anyone's mother." The taxi came. They helped her into it carefully, as if she were made of something that might shatter. The grandson looked back at Ritwik with an expression of such naked gratitude that it hurt to witness. --- Back in his corner of the verandah, Ritwik couldn't settle. He opened his laptop—an old thing that hummed like an animal with a chronic ailment—and tried to work. Numbers. Percentages. *Nutritional outcomes in refugee populations.* The words blurred. He thought of his mother in Kolkata, in the house that wasn't really his anymore. His brother had married and moved away. His sister had a family. His mother had become very small inside all those rooms. She was still alive—this he knew because his sister wrote—but she was becoming the kind of living that is very close to not. He had been a refugee only for seventeen years. That was nothing, really. Less than nothing. An eye blink in historical terms. But it had been enough to change the shape of everything. His face, his accent, the way he held himself. His mother's face when he'd last seen her—two years ago now, when he'd managed to go back for a month—looking at him as if trying to match the boy she'd known with the man in front of her. "You've become someone else," she'd said, not unkindly. "Yes," he'd agreed. There was no point in lying. He closed the laptop. He picked up the letter again. His sister had written in the margin, in very small letters, something she clearly hoped he wouldn't notice: *Please come soon. Please come before.* Before. That single word, unfinished. Outside, the afternoon had deepened. Somewhere in the city, an old woman was lying in a taxi with a confused grandson beside her, trying to understand how morning had become crisis. Somewhere, Ritwik's mother was sitting in a room that had too many windows, watching the street, waiting for a son who had become a refugee in ways that had nothing to do with borders. Ritwik stood and looked out through the gaps in the blue tarpaulin. The street was beginning to empty. Vendors were packing up. The day was closing in on itself, the way days do, indifferently, without asking permission. He thought of something his colleague had said once, at the office, over terrible tea: "We keep records. That's all we can do. We keep records so that later, someone will know that we were here, that we mattered." But what if the record was incomplete? What if it was only the shape of a person, the outline, and not the person themselves? What if all the forms and figures and careful documentation only proved that you were absent? Ritwik opened the letter again. He read the unfinished "before" and understood that it was not unfinished at all. It was complete. It was a full sentence. It was the only sentence that mattered. He began to write a reply. Not with a pen, which would have been too deliberate, too final. But in his mind, the way he wrote most of his important words now, words that never quite reached anyone: *I am coming. I don't know when, but I am coming. I will come before the before. I promise.* The blue tarpaulin fluttered in the evening breeze. The street darkened. And in that corner of the verandah, a man who was not quite from anywhere wrote words to people he loved in a language that was no longer exactly his own, trying to build a bridge out of syllables and distance and the kind of faith that refugees must have to survive.

19. The Void Inside the Idol

It is neither complete darkness nor pure night, but rather a world draped in memory and neglect; this is why the dust of the archive must be brushed away. All around, decay and the gnawing of insects, yet one cannot confine oneself merely to collecting, to hoarding. Not through mantra or ritual, but by returning again and again to the goddess-essence of all life, seeking her rhythm.

By some strange force, the river becomes terrible; in its black waters lie memories like a poet's bones, submerged. Writing memorial verses to death, I forgot the simple happiness of life—the scent of rice and milk pudding on the wind. The happiness glimpsed from the shore seems but an illusion woven of thread. And yet from somewhere, old age and decay break through perfectly, and even the humblest creatures cry out within life's struggle for sin, virtue, and bread.

In this world, even death's monument is bought and sold at market rates. Once adorned in outward finery and moving forward, one sees there is no true smile left—only its hollow shell remains. All around, metallic, hard, poisonous civilization; radioactive clouds weight down the sky. Even at the dawn of birth, there is no clear, human presence left—the kind that soaks in the rain.

20. The Sand That Lost Its Swimming

Vine, in so little time your green radiance has grown pale and small, as though crushed between hard pebbles. Hope, you yourself are uncertain whose you are. Bit by bit, a little poison, a little wound, a little ill collected until the light of night extinguished.

From the memory of lost swimming, water is drawn up again; a banyan sapling is planted, frost returns, footprints and the sad blue-stone evening. From within the valley mist, from that space between story's ending and beginning, something calls out—and for this, people wish to offer flowers, fruit, offspring, lamps, everything.

If nothing else, at least ask this much: Did you return, my son? For sand knows well where the swimmer went under; but it asks nothing, says nothing.

21. This Much Alone

They gave me shelter, gave me food, gave me clothes too—cloth woven by their own hands. In the scent of that cloth lies such deep memory that it cannot be wholly expressed in words.

Touching her two hands with wonder, I gave her my left hand; and with my right hand, tearing the lobe of my ear as a mark of a new bond, I placed in her hands a green stone ornament. This small mark, delicate as an eyelid and soft as down feathers, was held with such care.

The green stone slowly grows cold. The blood from the torn ear lobe dries. Earth holds everything in the end, but what exactly it holds—man, memory, or only the mark—remains unclear.

22. The Migrant

Rain falls on the quilt, and within its sound echoes a moral law: you must not take another's things. Hunger, the substance of birth, the body's primal growth—all these together gradually build life's form.

When one returns from far away, through winter and ice of an almost mythical distance, Mother makes bread from red flour, and the memory of lemon groves awakens all around. The smell of torn paper, the layers of neighborhoods and streets, the broken homesteads of many castes and communities—through all of this an old man lifts me toward an abandoned, ancient place.

That night new stars appeared, whose light had only just reached the earth, though perhaps they themselves had already died. Yet their light survives.

Then it was as though I myself built a ship and made the sea too. At winter's sharp dawn, I spoke your name.

# Twenty-Three: Winter-Worn White Hands

O primal essence, before you came, I too knew thirst, I too needed water. I broke the earth seeking it; in my thirst I licked stone, and when all else failed, I drank my own blood. Through countless deaths and the fire of births, this body, this color, this flesh took shape. So now I come before you with the prayer of that ancient water.

You seemed to appear of your own accord, like a painter of blind unrest. The birds died before I could even see you; leaves lay like a coverlet over your sleep. Your form was molded from rubbed earth-pigment, the scratch of fingernail-brushes, the clay of bone and flesh, the soil of graves, autumn sun and sweat.

Before you went to sleep, life-sap flowed like red milk; then across the vast expanse of time came something like a deluge. You were at once the primal seed and also the green womb that holds the seed. Through the fever of the night watch, I felt your dim touch—one hand soft, the other as if gripping a throat gone hoarse. In the end, there remains only the sensation of a winter-worn, white hand.

# Twenty-Four: The Nameless River

Dawn breaks, yet darkness still lies thick everywhere, so you cannot say whether to call it night or not. The possibility of tomorrow narrows to a thin path and vanishes into the distance. Among the fallen madar trees, the lost hours, and the call of a nameless river, as you seem to sink into all these, your eyes tell me to stop.

With madar paste you can glue colored paper together, but the broken truth of swamps and jungles remains. The fear of Asadh and Shravan, floods, collapse—they break every boundary and force people to stand face to face with hard reality. Even when white bones catch the eye, the question rises: did this person, this creature, ever have a home?

You cannot say when the earth beneath your feet turned salty and unsafe. Yet you must cross a long distance to catch the last train. Your body carries the blood of many primal, wild histories; within life itself, you learn at last to make peace with fear, unknown paths, and violence. Then that final train, like black smoke, burrows into your body.

Even the brief meeting of two ants is so small, so easily lost. So it must be covered before the ice age arrives. In the end, that train never returns, and no one wishes to know the name of the river that once carried so much.

# Twenty-Five: Without Body

Touch, laughter, tears, dim warmth—all are being called, but the question remains: where will they find shelter within this broken, poisoned, bodyless being? I am both the smoke of poison and language itself; long ago I shed my old body. Now a disordered existence surrounds me—fever, a tired afternoon, a life painted by clumsy hands.

In memory I see the library’s veranda, light growing dim, heavy books, a white sari, a figure with a vina in its hands, and behind modern urbanity, a blurred adolescent love. On a winter’s sudden dusk, some music plays, but no one turns to listen.

Once there was only sound. Then rhythm, night, the still form of feeling had not yet taken shape. Today that same sound relaxes and drifts on waves of a different sweetness. Questions arise: why does something linger, why does something not fade.

Nature’s primal darkness, black water, small creatures, unknown life—all of it flows in a single current.

When that powerful water recedes, the shore seems to hang suspended in an empty sky; country, time, person, relationship—all identity washes away.

Birthday sweets, the father’s voice, a dark-skinned girl’s dream of seeing the capital at best, even in all of these the speaker finds himself like a thin, weak right hand, as though he were merely part of someone else’s life. In the end, the question remains: the body may not exist, but does the song endure?