No, I enjoy being alone in the house, I say.

Srinjoy Dey

When mother rings me, worried, every night as the clock strikes nine — she says she wants me to feel better. I tell her not to worry, I say there is no way I would let anything get me down.

Then I sit down to write a biography of a woman that a publishers’ collective has commissioned — “write us a think-piece on the hardships of a woman as you see it” — I say I don’t. I say I am staring down a blind alley. A blind man in a cul-de-sac.

So I step out in my mask, sniffling on the heat of my mouth — my nostrils covered in sweat. I buy carrots, green vegetables — capsicums, beans, and a lonesome cabbage.

That night I lecture my mother about the hardships of the migrant laborers, and how she is as complicit for their state as the government is. I say we all could do better than we have done.

At night I dream about writing the biography — I dream swimming through the story of a woman who works a typewriter to get by — her tough fingers sending ripples through the paperwhite ocean. The originality of the scene is haunting. Like it has been lived time and time over. Like the grains of the red nail paint have been polished over their ghost.

And after she finishes her shift, she walks to a small house at the corner of an unnamed street. I think of walking away, but I go and knock at the door, another woman opens.

“Does a young stenographer live here?” I ask.

“What do you want with her?”

“I had to speak to her,” I say, “about a memory.”

“What memory?” She asks.

“Something that would make me feel better,
can I come in?”

“No,” she says,
“I enjoy being alone in the house.”