# 8. The Resurrection, Part 5: Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
I walk out to the terrace, and place my glass on a coaster with a picture of Le Chat Noir on it. When I look down, the white mosaic glitters with refracted light. When I look up I can see no stars.
Thank you for subscribing to Wit’s End! Click here to view my blog! Below, is the fifth and last part of my serialised short story The Resurrection. To read Parts 1 to 4, please see the archives.
PART 5.
Malini said she’d watched Thelma and Louise thrice before. Four times, including that day with us. Driving off a canyon is one way out, I guess. But you won’t see Sara and I doing a Butch-Cassidy-and-The-Sundance-Kid off Amboli Ghat! Look, I don’t blame you if you think I’m worming my way out of a difficult denouement. That I’m dishing out a Hollywood ending. Perhaps I am. But so what if I am. It’s better than the alternative, don’t you think? I’m just a documenter trying to provide a narrative representative of our times. And here is how this narrative ends:
It’s midnight at Gorai beach and small things are glowing under our feet. Above, three dots glint at us off Orion’s belt. Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka. Close together, but light-years apart. From where we stand, Sara, Maya, and I, the stars look bite-sized, and as we walk into the water, Maya says: did you know the moon is drifting away from the earth at the rate of 3.8 centimeters a year? Behind us, a car’s headlights pierce the dark beach. It’s the Mercedes, gliding towards us soundlessly and then stopping, wheels whining, stuck in sand. Its doors open and shut and a lumbering creature in a white kurta-pajama closes in on us, glowing in the moonlight.
I’ll have you arrested for kidnapping, Abhijeet yells. What? I said. I can’t hear you. He splashes forward like a wounded buffalo. Maya clings to my leg. He is knee-deep in, arm’s distance from us now, stinking of the rum we spat at him at the red light. I can’t stop laughing. Sara’s doubled over, in tears. He growls something in a dialect I don’t understand, lunges forward, picks up Maya, puts her on his shoulders, and walks away from us, deeper. Maya puts her small hands on his balding head and looks back at us, toes trailing in the water. I want to go towards her but I sit down in the sea. Then lie down in it. The waves wash my hair. My ears are full of salt and shells but I can hear Abhijeet and Maya talking. Something about Venus and mothers. Something about love and peacocks. I close my eyes and imagine what it must feel like to be unborn. Sloshing around on a private island. Safe. Warm. Waiting. For something. Can’t quite put a finger on what.
Eye of newt! shouts Sara. Sitting up in the water I churn the ocean with an imaginary stick. It’s time to go home. We walk, sodden, the four of us, past the beached Mercedes and get into little blue, waiting on the dirt road, like a small, obedient dog. I’m driving. Abhijeet and Maya are at the back. Sara’s in the front, cross-legged, and adjusting her right knee so that it’s not in the way of the gearshift. Within minutes, the wild fades to gray, night to day. Some kilometers later, Abhijeet and Maya get off at the mansion, and Sara at her place, where Biraj is asleep on the landing in the David Bowie T-Shirt, goddammit.
If you are enjoying this story and would like to read Parts 1 to 4 of The Resurrection, please visit the archives! Or share it with a friend!
On the way home, I stop at Super Juice Centre at the red light and order two Ganga-Jamunas. One for me and one for the boy with half a face. My hands are sticky on the steering wheel from the juice of oranges and lemons. I roll little blue’s windows down and turn up the volume: Son, she said, have I got a little story for you. What you thought was your daddy, was nothing but a… Salt spray thickens on my windscreen as I race down The Queen’s Necklace. I flick my wipers on and off to clear it away which only makes it worse. When I get home I sit at Jeet’s Amstrad CPC 464 and this is what I write:
Ila the orphan, was raised by wolves witches, and when she turned twenty-one, she used her mother’s money to buy the magical village by the sea. With the help of her evil step-father, she outbid the theme parks and the hotels, and let everything be itself. At first, the world said no. But Ila knew the world was vaudeville and soon, the peacocks would come, and later, the turtles and everything else too. We are here to look at the stars! said Ila to her constituency, and when the moon is full, we must howl, and ask it not to forsake us! And now, when her descendants, the survivors, look up at the sky or down at the ground beneath their feet and find things that glitter and glow, they remember not just backwards, but forwards too. And everybody lived happily ever after, and happily ever before. Forever, and ever. Amen.
The End.
I’m no Shakespeare, I know. I know! But I’m tired. I’m so tired. I’m tired of the past. I want to leave it behind. I want it to leave me behind. I turn off the computer and go to bed. The sunshine streams through my window, onto my face. I have strange dreams about blue-and-white block-printed shirts flying in V. When I wake up, it’s almost dark and Sara and Maya are at the dining table, playing scrabble. I’m winning says Maya. Meena’s sent dinner, says Sara.
I get out of bed and run my hand across Jeet’s books. I pour myself an Old Monk and Thumbs Up, walk out to the terrace, and place my glass on a coaster with a picture of Le Chat Noir on it. When I look down, the white mosaic glitters with refracted light. When I look up I can see no stars and the smog floats like a grey swan over the Arabian Sea. But when I turn my head a little to left and down, lights twinkle across the harbour, and The Gateway of India glows fat and gold.
The dogs are up. And so are we. The streets belong to us again.
I just love this city at night.
© Tara Sahgal
VERY good!
Not draggy. Sharp and oh so vivid ...
love the Old Monk too.
Cannot wait for your next short story.
🙏
my mind is officially blown. fabulous. ❤️