Siddhartha Deb

Light at the End of the World

Srijita Sarkar 

Someone arrives, someone whose fingers intertwine with yours, someone in whose company the city tilts on its axis.

It is the city then suddenly become different, housed on a planet in whose sky float two crescent moons, where the sun, every day, rises in the south and sets in the north. Then, one morning, the beloved is gone, and it is the same old city once again, squatting on an aged, abused planet spinning along a shopsoiled, familiar axis, a city that seems more worn and rundown than ever.

She does not know if what is on the faces of these people is abjection or agitprop, this contingent of men and women who came prepared to demonstrate their misery, who knew, unlike their hammer and sickle comrades, that they would never get any closer than this to power and its indifference.

They ripple in the darkness and the women float, like angels, like djinns, like souls traveling between worlds.

Her last friend is gone from the city and she has no home worth returning to. If this is the edge and the freedom Bibi has been seeking much of her life, why is it so dull now in its terror?

Is the yearning of one human being for another fiction or truth?

It is like those few minutes of his life have been stolen, and he fears that the gap will always remain, an interruption that will render the before and the after as forever out of synchronicity and that his life will only proceed askew from this point on

Love, that is the word, he thinks, such an embarrassing, awkward word, such a small word in this world of big weapons

Internet of Things in the Andamans. Mala takes this to mean that there will be Wi-Fi everywhere. She demonstrates, picking up her ballpoint pen. “Wi-Fi in this,” she says. She taps her forehead with the pen. “Wi-Fi in this.” She taps Bibi’s head. “Wi-Fi everywhere.” She laughs, scandalized by her own inventiveness. “The Internet of Everything,”

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