Kamala stood silently as her mother talked, but she refused to pay any
attention to what was being said. It was as if the part of her brain that
registered death had been broken.
She had been thinking about cleaning her room, and today seemed like
a great day to do it. She started by taking out the spiderwebs. Then she
wiped the glasses of the mirror as well as that of the windows. She dusted the books on her table. Finally, she opened her cupboard and started folding her clothes. The old dresses were pushed aside and forgotten. Among those she found a pink skirt with flowers around the borders, one of the dresses she wore when she was barely ten years old. Those old clothes had a dusty smell. She ran her hands through the dress she was wearing now. It was a plain, grey kurta that blended in with the colors of the walls of her room.
It took her the whole day to clean everything. When it was over, she
threw herself onto the bed and looked at the ceiling fan. It was too tall for her to reach even when she stood on a table. So she left it as it was, dusty and dirty.
Kamala was trying to sleep, but like a slowly rising tide, the thought of
Hassan occupied her mind. The night was calm, like an empty prayer
hall. Still, she got out of bed to close those windows. As she got closer,
she noticed a human figure towards the end of the road. His skinny arms
and messy hair seemed familiar. It was not a homeless person; it was
Hassan. He was standing near the street light, and it felt like he was
waiting for someone.
She needed a minute to decide whether this was real or not. She wasn’t afraid of him. It didn't matter whether he was alive or dead; fear was not an emotion she could associate with him. She thought about her childhood—a time when she wore that pink dress and ran around the
beach chasing waves. They were friends back then. They spend their
evenings after school and their summer holidays together, playing games and pranking their neighbors. Somewhere around that time, their worlds began to change. He was still the same boy that lived down the street, but things were different. They could no longer ride their bicycles or fly their kites together. He was a boy, and as a boy, he began to explore the
world around him. She was a girl, and as a girl, her world became limited to her house. Even though they shared the same neighborhood, they grew apart. Little by little, they stopped talking to each other. Their friendship was now reduced to an occasional smile. Maybe that was why she wasn’t sad that he died. He was already a memory for her, a ghost of her childhood.
