Gravity on the terrace

30 Days 30 Stories: Day 2

When Sasha invited me over to her place, finally, it felt like an achievement. Not because it was the first time we were going to be alone. It wasn’t. I wasn’t even sure we were going to be alone. Her mom might be around, she said, and her brother hardly left the house. So most probably, we were going to be stealing moments of privacy in a sea of surveillance, always looking over our shoulders to see if we were being watched.

And yet, despite all of this, I was excited. I was going to see where she lived. I was going to see the space she had made for herself, and it felt like gaining admittance to a secret universe through a backdoor in a backalley. When we took the cab to Akshayanagar, we got down about 500 meters away from her house, because I wanted to buy samosas from a shop near the crossroads. I wasn’t hungry. I did it mostly to prove a point. I asked her whether the samosas were good and she said she had no idea, and I was indignant that you could live on a street for a decade without tasting the samosas at the street corner. But after buying the samosas I felt a tad guilty that I was acting like my dad, trying to show her that I had unearthed something about her world that she didn’t know herself. I didn’t think that was my intention, but then, who knows what’s buried deep inside?

She didn’t say anything. She hardly says anything. That’s one of the things I like about her, but it also drives me mad at times. We walked on the paved sidewalk on the right side of the road, where sturdy trees decked with pink flowers stood sentinel at equally spaced intervals. The flowers looked like cherry blossoms, and the carpet of pink petals that we trod on produced a cloying sweet smell that made me slightly dizzy. Sasha walked next to me with her hands folded, her palms running over her bare arms, from her elbow to her shoulder, and from her shoulder to her elbow, like she was warming herself in the cold. Strange, because it was a warm summer afternoon.

The sidewalk was broken, dug-up, encroached by broomstick sellers, and littered with dog crap. The road was no better. Tractors with trailers carrying broken rocks threatened to run us over, any second. This place hadn’t been like this always, she argued. It used to be called Akshayavana, literally translating to endless forest. The vana became nagar at some point¹, the forest giving way to a concrete jungle, and now it was hard to even cross the road. Manholes bled drainage onto the road like suppurating sores, and people just drove around these scabs like they were to be avoided and not mended. Mindless of the filth, people sold litchis, pineapples, and mangoes stacked in pyramids in yellow trucks that doubled as makeshift stalls.

While climbing the four floors to her apartment, I wondered why Sasha was so hesitant to invite me home. She had insisted that her mother wouldn’t mind, and that her neighbors didn’t really care who visited her because she was living with “family.” While talking about her brother Steve though, she dragged her sentences a little without explaining why. She had just said, “You’ll see.”

But it wasn’t surprising. Our relationship had sort of been like this, always. For a long time, she didn’t even follow me back on Instagram. Even after she followed me, she wasn’t sharing pictures of our nights out in Church Street or Koramangala or Indiranagar on her stories. I guess I could have asked her if I wanted to, but to tell the truth, I preferred it like this.

I was curious to know why she moved this way though, like a shadow. She didn’t tell people where she was going, her replies were sparse, but she always showed up where she was supposed to show up when she was supposed to show up. Three times out of four, her face would be wrapped in a veil like a desert bedouin from Dune only leaving slits for her eyes, and I didn’t understand why she was so paranoid. She didn’t have any relatives in this city, after all, and there was no reason to hide her beautiful face. But maybe it was just the dust in Bangalore, or the pollen from the Parthenium. I find myself thinking about all these micropuzzles in the interstices of my life with her, but maybe I’m just overthinking it.

Her house was just a house. It wasn't amazing, it wasn't a mess, it wasn't weird or anything out of the ordinary. There was a cross on the wall, made out of beautiful shiny wood, and some photo frames gathered dust on shelves too high for me to reach. Apart from that, it was kind of spartan. Tastefully decorated, but everything in white. White walls, white curtains, white dining table, white chairs, a white lamp by the TV, a white fridge. The shit colored sofa was the only thing that seemed out of place.

There were no bookshelves, but there was a TV stand with wooden paneling behind it. Books stacked in vertical towers had found cozy homes in recesses carved into this paneling. The ones closest to the door all had “Murakami” on the spine. I picked the one on top and my hands were caked with dust as a puff flew into the air. It was a copy of The Elephant Vanishes, a white book with the picture of a girl's eye on it. I asked Sasha if she liked this book. She said it was her brother's and asked me if I wanted anything to drink. Yes, Please.

The first thing I’d felt walking into this place was that it was terribly hot. She said that was because we were directly under the terrace and it got hot in the summer. But we were already halfway into June. Why was it still hot? She shrugged. Why didn't they have AC? They did. There was only one AC in the house, and it was in her brother's room, which was locked. A Calvin and Hobbes poster stuck on his door said “Jeenyus at Work.”

"When is he going to come out?" I asked. She said he probably wouldn't. Huh.

We sat down on the shit-colored sofa to watch TV. There wasn't anything specific I wanted to watch. Watching TV isn't something I do intentionally. It’s something like background music. I usually let my friends run something like Modern Family or Parks and Recs or Seinfeld and just catch familiar scenes and laugh. Right then, I was interested only in Sasha. She looked great and she smelled great. She was staring at the screen like she was trying to concentrate on the episode of Bojack Horseman that was playing. But her breathing was slightly tighter than before. She was expecting my hand to creep up the nape of her neck as I leaned toward her. "Somebody will see us," she whispered. We were so close, when the door behind us clicked open and we jumped away from each other.

I continued to watch TV for a second like jumping was a normal part of my repertoire of movements. Then I turned back and saw the guy stretching like a cat and looking at the screen. He was tall, lanky, and wore an oversized shirt. His head was covered with a mass of curls. "Which episode is this one?" he asked. "The one where the guy dies of cancer?" I didn't know. I was watching Bojack Horseman for the first time, I said. Only then did he notice that I was a new face and waved.

“Steve,” he said.
“Kanan,” I replied.
“I know,” he said.

He wanted to have lunch. Sasha asked him to heat something up.
He asked what was in which box.
Sasha whined, saying just look it up on the pictures that mom sent no.
He asked, “Where?”
She said “Kuriens.” The family group, she said to me. When Steve continued to rattle a lot of boxes in the fridge while sighing and grumbling, Sasha rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen to help him.

I had nothing to say. I only have a brother, much older than me who’s living in the US now, and we barely talk once a week. Here, there was a music to their groans and their whines that was entirely new to me. I was kind of envious that Steve had the power to annoy his sister. With me she was mostly prim and proper, talking in reserved tones. Is that why she didn't want me to come home, and see what she was like on the other side?

"Why don't we eat too?" I asked Sasha. “I’m kind of hungry.”

She said okay, and we moved toward the teak dining table that looked like it was from a different era. Steve was heating a box of something in the microwave. It turned out to be Chicken Alfredo. He asked me if I preferred something else, like lemon rice. I was fine with it. This was how I knew Sasha's mom first, through the food she cooked. I hoped I’d get to see her one day. I didn't want this thing with Sasha to be a temporary phase. But I really couldn't tell what she felt about me, and I didn't want to ask. Asking always ruins things.

But I didn't have anything to ruin with Steve; he was just a guy I had met after all. I asked him what he did. He said he played computer games and streamed them on Twitch. Nice. Was he making a lot of money? Not yet, he said. Maybe some day. What did he play? Valorant. What kind of game was that? FPS. Fantasy. All of his answers were monosyllabic grunts.
Like brother, like sister.
Every time I’d send her a Whatsapp message at the beginning, she would reply with a single sentence. She would always reply, but it felt like I was talking to a chatbot at times. But that's how people respond when they feel like you're interrogating them. Or talking about topics that you couldn't give two shits about.

"I've always wanted to read Murakami. But I didn't know where to start," I told Steve.
"What sort of story are you looking for? Love story? Fantasy? College story?" he asked.
"Anything. I'm not really sure. I don't read that many novels," I said.
"Maybe you should start with a short story then."
"Which one?"
"There's one in that stack over there, with a picture of a monkey on the cover. First Person Singular. It's not his best collection, most of the stories kind of suck, but there's one called With the Beatles. You should read that one."
"Oh, I love the Beatles!"
"It has very little to do with the Beatles. But it's called With the Beatles."
"What's it about?"
"You'll see," he said.

You'll see. So it ran in the family.

Sasha was toying with her pasta. She had separated the chicken pieces into a pile and had eaten only a few pieces of the penne. Her plate looked disgusting, with dollops of white sauce spread in uneven blotches. I asked her if she was okay. Her head was aching and she wanted to lay down for a while. I was kind of glad when she left the table, that the three of us didn't have to keep sitting at the table scrounging for a common topic.

Steve asked if I played FIFA and when I said yes, he turned on the XBOX. I'm not great at it, but I'm not terrible either. I can give someone a good time if they know how to play. Besides, it takes the pressure off the conversation. Steve asked me what Sasha had told me about him. I said, nothing much. I hadn't known her that long and we didn't really talk about her family.

I just knew that their mother had gone to their village in Kerala, and that their father was AWOL most of the time, traveling to Dubai and Mumbai and a few other places, managing some properties and meeting people. I don't know what he did, but I didn't want to probe. Maybe he was a politician, maybe he was a gangster. I would cross that bridge when I came to it. I have this habit of trying to solve all problems at the same time. But this time I wanted to do things differently.

I realized I had zoned out. I asked Steve what he did on the weekends.

He said he played games, mostly. He had a couple of friends, and he went out with them now and then. Most of his friends had left the country, but he hardly felt like even leaving the house. I said he should come drink with me and Sasha sometime. I didn't really mean it. I was trying to be nice. He closed his eyes and ran his hand over his forehead, like he was mowing his unkempt cowlick.

He paused the game, went to the fridge, and asked, "Beer?"

I nodded.

He took a couple of Kingfisher ultras, knocked the cap off them, and came back and sat down next to me.

“Kanan, can I tell you a story?” he asked.

"Does it have something to do with Mr. and Mrs. Kurien?" I asked. I was a bit uncomfortable going into their family history with Sasha not around. I didn’t know if she wanted me hearing this stuff.

He blinked.

"No, not at all. This only has to do with me. And a couple of other people whom nobody else knows… What do you remember of high school physics?” he asked.

“Not much. Wasn’t my strong suit,” I said.

“There was this question they used to ask once in a while. You drop a stone from a high place, and it takes a few seconds to hit the ground. You’ve got to calculate the height of the building from that. Do you remember?”

I nodded.

He pointed upwards. "We have a nice terrace, you know. There are flower pots on all the sides. One guy in this apartment maintains most of the pots. It's his hobby. And everyone else gets to enjoy it for free. We've been here for about eight years now. For the first three years, I used to walk on the terrace every day.
This building isn't very tall. But it's the tallest one around for quite some distance. You get a good breeze. You can see the sun set in the distance, and you can see it reflected off the glass panes of the Hiranandani buildings to the west. Sometimes there are clouds, and it's really nice. Eagles fly about. Bats fly overhead... It used to be really nice. I would walk for about thirty minutes every day.

But when you’re alone on the terrace, sometimes thoughts crop up in your head. There were small fragments of concrete and shards of broken flowerpots on the terrace. I would pick them up and drop them from the top when nobody was looking. Then I would time the fall. How long it took to fall from the top of the terrace to the street. Guess how long it took?”

I shrugged. “Five seconds?”

“Nah. Two seconds. That’s not much, but it isn’t instantaneous either. A two second fall corresponds to approximately twenty meters in height. The terrace was twenty meters away from the floor. You know how big a fall humans can survive? About 8 meters. Ten meters if you’re lucky. If you dropped from twenty meters, you’d be mush. Pure pulp.”

He paused for a second to see the strange expression on my face.

“Sorry, but that’s the kind of stuff you think about when you’re alone on the terrace. At that time, there was construction going on, on a lot across the road from us, to the North. This area used to be empty, but now a lot of people are buying up land around here and building flats. That was one of the buildings. Once the building was constructed, a caretaker and his family moved into the apartment.

There were just three of them. The caretaker and his wife, maybe in their twenties, and their baby. Every evening, around 6, the guy would go somewhere on his bike. The mother would lean over the balcony, holding her baby, and the baby would say bye to its dad.

The building's terrace was level with our apartment's and the baby and I could see each other eye-to-eye across the road. The baby would wave to me at times, encouraged by its mother. And I would wave back. It said something to me in its babytalk, and what it said was lost in the wind. Every evening, the mother would hold the baby in her arms and lean over the balcony, and I started to fear for the baby. Of course it was stupid, she knew how to hold a baby, and she was its mother and cared for it more than I could, but I still felt scared. The father would yell something back to the baby in response, and life would go on."

He sipped his beer. I didn't. I wanted to know where this was going.

"So one day, I had this strange dream,” he said. “I was on the terrace as usual. The clouds were salmon, and there were eleven eagles spiraling in the sky, and there was an amazing breeze flowing from North to South, and it touched the baby on the other roof before it reached me, and I was watching it smile at me across the street. It was just a speck. Small enough that I couldn't hear what it was saying, but not so small that I couldn't make out its pearly-toothed smile. The father stepped out on the street and looked up, and the mother leaned over, saying something to the baby. The baby was leaning over the balcony, from the terrace, four floors above the street."

He sipped his beer.

"She slipped. The baby fell from her hand."

He shot me a terrible look, like he was begging me for forgiveness.

"The instant the baby slipped, I heard a sickening scream from the mother and a cry of surprise from the father, and I put my hands on my ears and I walked away. I didn't look back. I didn't see what happened. I didn't want to know. There was nobody on the terrace. Nobody on any terrace, except me and that mother and that baby.

And I came back, and I locked myself in my room. Outside the locked room, I heard voices of people, screams, and people calling out my name. I heard soft knocks on the door. I pretended I couldn’t hear them and lay with my eyes closed. The knocking got harder and harder, and I suddenly had this uneasy feeling that I had forgotten to lock the door. I sat up in my bed and saw the doorknob slowly twist open… And then I woke up."

I expected him to say something, but it looked like he had finished his story. I didn't know what to say. “What happened to the baby in real life?” I asked.

“Probably nothing,” he said. “Since I had that dream though, I haven’t felt like going to the terrace much. So I really don’t know.”

He looked at me holding my bottle without sipping on it. "You don't have to drink your beer if you don't want to. I'm sorry. This isn't a story you tell to somebody you've just met. But I kind of felt like talking to you." He paused. “Sasha likes you, you know.”

"She talks about me?" I asked.
"No. But she hasn’t cried as much since she started going out with you."
"Sasha cries? About what?"
"She hasn't cried around you?"
"Not even once."
"Huh." He shook his head.

"What are you talking about?" Sasha was standing in the hall with us, tying back her hair with a rubber band. It looked like her headache was gone.

"Nothing, just random stuff."

Steve got up and went back into his room and locked himself in. Sasha asked me if I felt like taking a walk. There was a park nearby, with a lake in the middle. I wasn't really thinking. I just went along with what she was saying.

The park stank of Bangalore filth. Bangalore stinks the same no matter where you go. Divided by areas, united by sewage. Mosquitoes were hovering around the marshy areas where water had stagnated. Middle aged women talking in Tamil walked past us. A boy kept yelling "Saamp saamp saamp saamp" leaning over the fence, while looking at the lake. What he thought was a snake turned out to be a swimming bird with its neck above the water. When it climbed onto a dead tree branch, he grinned and said, "Saamp nahi panchi!²" and ran away. A jogger crossed us twice. I felt Sasha's arms on my bare arm. She was holding my left hand with both hands and leaning on it like she was listening for a heartbeat. She was smiling. I felt a little hot, aware that people were watching us, but I didn't want to interrupt her either. She looked at me and said, "I like your silence. I don't get to hear much of it." I laughed and put my arm around her, still thinking of the falling baby. She had no idea why I was silent, but I didn't want to ruin her illusion. At least, not yet.

We walked back to the apartment and took the lift to the fourth floor.

Just as she was about to turn the key in the lock, I asked her, "Say, can we see the terrace?" She frowned and said, "Okay, sure."

We climbed the flight of steps to the terrace that was barred by a metal door. We opened it and went outside. The terrace was bare concrete, except for a few pots here and there. It was about 6 in the evening, and the sun was already setting. The sky was vermillion, the eagles were there just like Steve had said, and I walked to the corner of the building. I walked back and forth. I was trying to locate the building he had talked about, but I didn't know where to look.

"What are you searching for?" Sasha asked me.
"Nothing, I'm just looking."
She kept staring at me until I caved.
"Steve told me something," I said.
"He told you about that dream of his," she said.
"Yes." I hesitated. "I'm looking for that building."

She stood staring at me for a minute or two, and then walked to a corner that faced the setting sun. There was a vacant lot next to the apartment we were standing on. There was a road next to it. She pointed across the road and said "There. That's where he says he saw it happen."

I looked where she was pointing, but couldn't see anything, only trees.

"Where exactly?"
"There." She repeated.
"But that looks like an empty lot... Did they... Demolish the building or something?" "No. There never was any building," she said. She was looking at the spot. Her face was half-turned away from me and I thought I saw her eyes shimmering. But when she looked at me again, they were dry.

“I’ll tell you about Steve some other time,” she said.

I didn't say anything. I just looked across the street at the empty plot of land where the building didn't stand, thinking about how Steve had completely believed every word he’d told me. I wished the sky would stay orange, but pretty soon it was dark, and we had to go in.

---

Story notes:

Thanks for reading. If you got to the end, I’m curious what you feel about this one. This was a very hard story for me to write, because every time I read through, it bummed me out. The original version of this story was much more dark and bleak. I didn’t have the courage to put that one out, but it exists.

Kanan and Sasha will be back in another story.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might like Family Affair (part of The Elephant Vanishes) and With the Beatles (part of First Person Singular), both short stories by Haruki Murakami.

I’ll be posting one story every day for the next 28 days. To get them via email:

You can read my other stories here.

1. Vana means forest. Nagar means street/city. (In Kannada/Hindi)

2. Saamp means snake. Panchi means bird. Nahi means “no” as in “Not a snake.” (In Hindi)