As she reached the top of the hill at the point where the tarmac became a paler blue, narrowing more into the middle of the road she knew she was almost home. Motorists, to avoid diving into the side squeezed themselves into the middle of the road, missing each other only by inches when one car was racing downwards and the other climbing up north. After that short stretch came the cluster of new salons, a wine shop and a pharmacy at the corner that commenced the European funded stretch which ran along Kabaka’s farm land. This stretch had the darkest tarmac in the Central region comparable only with the highway road type. It had a side walk too and properly cemented and stoned trenches.

She could see herself taking the turn she had taken for the past three years, reversing into the parking lot, the calming feeling of having reached. The blast of the AC was off, the incompetence of aluminum-free deodorant and the pollution and panic of a smog filled capital city were behind her. The sound of motorcycles buzzing were also far away, the driver who created a third lane in a two way which had not been wide enough for one car, forgotten. And though the sun still glared violently, she read one last distraction on her phone, paused the podcast and switched on mum mode. Some days, her baby was standing up at the potted balcony on the first floor with the maid when she came. Jumping and screaming hysterically in approval, he could not contain his joy. Even when she lowered to his height and held her hands out to greet him, he continued to race back and forth in the room. It was a superstar’s welcome.

It was that one place in the city where the cushion covers were her choice and the bedsheets smelled like her skin and where she caught visions of sunlight and blue clouds through the big glass doors as it shone through the house unrestrained. When it rained; the rain started from the back, at the kitchen window, sweeping through the house with the smell of earth, the falling rush of rain sweeping through the cascading valley and the green below, bringing with it a renaissance of hope and freedom. It had been her first home away, from home.

The memories within its walls were now contaminated with dreams of her wildest fears, a light under the door, the baby gone. The morning when the offer for her to move came, someone or something had jumped off the balcony and set off the security alarm while the army soldiers slept under the stairs. She locked eyes with the unpunished culprits, at the end of the road. They watched her coming and going, as she run on the balcony with the child, as she jumped and waltzed with an invisible stranger and salsad and rumbad when she closed her curtains after the sun set and the blue the flickers of light from the TV and speakers drew them towards her abode, igniting a chilling, scavenging, blood thirst for money.

It was not just the baby that had learned to walk in this house, they too had learned how to walk in this house. On the kitchen floors, her shadow lingered, where she had made burgers at breakfast, popcorn on Friday nights, her versions of Chicken tikka, banana cakes, chapatti, attempted pizzas, two which had been successful. On some weekends, when she woke up before anyone else, she sometimes sat in the middle of the floor and closed her eyes, vaguely aware of the two boys rising and falling nonchalantly in the rooms behind her. The plants still held the wetness of the morning dew and the first morning air slipped in through the partially open balcony doors.

On the night that they were robbed, they had been a team during that day. He had helped, she had managed, they had got it all figured out. And then at the mercy of one deranged soul, they had woken up; to things gone, a pink bedsheet outside their door and a blunt edged knife and kitchen scissors in the chair closest to their room, to let them know, that in a heartbeat their lives could have changed forever.

The first night at this new place held the smell of something that had not been lived in for a long time. There was a heaviness and a woodiness about it and the baby cried and craved for their comfort and even the domineering burglar proof was not enough to make them feel at home. So she set about making it feel like home. The chairs were set up and so was the bed. The pictures too, were hang. But in the morning, the baby asked if they could go home. Home, so that he could peel the paint off the back of the bathroom wall, stand in the shower for what felt like hours, busy, scrubbing the walls, drinking water, making bubbles and pouring out all the pa-pa-pa (soap) from their containers into his sponge quickly before she came back.

It was the third maid in three weeks, the first weekend in a new place without his parents and the next week, a day and night in an enclosed place, beautiful and exotic but new, again. He threw up twice and refused to sleep. He got so sick afterwards, she wondered how she could have missed it.

How do you fight with things you can’t see?

In the second week in the new apartment, he left to make money. It is part of the deal, isn’t it? To set it all up, while she holds it all down so that they can make a life worth living? So, she slept in their bed alone and thought about her baby in the other room, reminding herself why he could not sleep in their bed. It was so that at 12 years old during a particularly heavy thunderstorm he would not come knocking on his parents’ door and ask to sleep in their bed. It was so that, his father would not turn to her in frustration, repulsed by the cowardice of her children and order him to sleep in the baby’s crib next to them if he really wanted to sleep in their room just because of lightning.

He is finally breathing without trouble, she thought and with that she switched off and drifted away on her side of the bed between two apartments, opposite the family house on the right. The neighbour downstairs had stopped playing his radio so loudly through the night at her request and so the night was artificially quiet. The caretaker had said he played it from January to December. She could sense that it had been incredibly difficult for him to switch off his radio, but she had become very sensitive to sound since her pregnancy. She used to call the noise pollution people from the City Authority on her neighbours in the old neighbourhood. Even though, they usually did not come, with the number at her disposal and the bored woman who actually picked up regardless of how late it was, it was one of the highest civic powers she had ever held in this dusty banana republic of constipated systems.

The noise back at their former apartment, was nothing compared to the dizzying city vibe of this new area. It had been occasional and it did not overwhelm the slow placed residential life. She had reported the bar nearby and it had stopped playing loud music. Sometimes, she even doubted whether it had stopped playing loud music because of her phone call or just by sheer luck. The church drums on Sunday had finally been halted due to the lockdown. The dogs from the safe house nearby only barked when, she assumed, its inmates tried to escape, on those rare nights when she had movement at the high gates that only opened and closed with such severe calculation. Finally, it was just the neighbours who had rowdy parties every once or so in a month where their guests slept over and their kids danced to Queen Sheba and both the hosts and their guests got drunk and engaged in loud verbal contests. But this too, only in hindsight, kind of felt like home.

The heartbeat of the new place was faster than her own pace. The highway was only three hundred metres away, the motorcycles whizzed and flew away, the churches sung with utmost abandon beginning on Wednesday at choir practice and the iron wielders baked and sliced their rods till late evening.

It was quiet tonight, until a box fell down.

It was a box wasn’t it? What box?

The wooden four post square bed was quivering. It was fight or flight and she chose to fight. There was someone in the house, someone under the bed. She checked. Eye to eye, with nothing else but shock induced courage. There was no one. The empty space underneath the bed looked back at her. She opened her door, the fear dying down, a light stomach churning light headed anxiety taking over. She opened baby’s door. He was asleep at the edge of his bed. Now he woke up by the sound of the door.” Eat!, Mummy, eat,” he said. He slid off the bed and led her to the kitchen.

She felt kind of special, having been awake at the right time of night to experience the earthquake but when she had told others about the 3:00 a.m. earth quake on Wednesday, they had asked, What earthquake? There were no records online either of any earthquake or tremour. But this was a country where COVID numbers were queried, where entire court records disappeared.

That Sunday, when she returned to the apartment, she felt, finally, the beginning of settling, the signs of relief, a sense of, coming home. As she put baby to sleep and scrubbed her feet and left them in a bucket of hot water, she thought about how this was starting to feel like coming home.

She felt compelled to turn on her- YouTube- and later wondered if she had become the noisy neighbour downstairs. Prayers to protect you from demons by Evangelist someone and off she went, against the blubbering of curses being broken until suddenly her eyes opened. The night before, her door had slowly creaked open even though she was sure she had locked it. This and her personal earthquake was what had motivated her to keep her YouTube on; chakra curses, yoga curses, third eye curses, Eastern meditation. She had learned her mantras with Deepak and Oprah. She reduced the volume.

Suddenly, there was banging on the door and then a desperate crying. She run to baby’s room and got him by her side. “Water! Mummy, water!” he cried.

When the water had been drank and the diaper had been changed, she got back into the bed and watched baby make a second attempt to sleep. She was holding the Fort down. She got out of bed again and picked up The Monk who Sold his Ferrari. More new age mysticism, she thought, Not right now. She had over the years learned how to sleep when she was assured of the morning, when the dark blue black clouds began to give way to yellow, when she was certain that there was dawn.

It passed by the front of the bed, like the silhouette of a transparent object, with only a dark hue to make out the curve of its shoulders. Her eyes followed it to her side of the bed. She looked away, almost to convince herself of her eyesight and then looked back. And in that moment her eyes again caught the curve at the shoulders, and she looked face to face with something which in all normalcy should not have been there. Fight. Flight. Freeze.

Freeze!

The bed began to rattle.

Fight!

… “Jesus!”, she cried out.

It stopped. It was the name they had said contained a victory and whatever it was seemed to know this too. The power struggle here felt more real than any other life around her.

Flight!

“Baby, let’s go.”