South Asian subcontinent. Uttar Pradesh.
The dirt road between the city and the village had been bad before the rain. Seven days of rain had made it worse: the ruts were deep enough to catch a bicycle wheel, the low sections had flooded and then dried into rough uneven mud, and the shoulders of the road had softened into something that gave way unpredictably underfoot.
Jahan peddled anyway.
The package on the rear seat was large enough to make the bicycle handle strangely, half a man's height and tied down with rope, shifting its weight on every rough section. Jahan had bought more than he usually would have. The rain had kept him from going home this week, and he had accumulated a list: enough food to carry the family through the next stretch, the sweets he had promised his son Amir before he left, and a silk scarf for his wife Tina that had cost him longer at the stall than he would admit.
He was a landless farmer. He had lost the land through the usual mechanisms: the better-connected families in the village had arranged things so that staying meant debt and leaving meant a small payment that was less than the land was worth and more than he could argue against. He was not a man who complained about this openly. He had understood from childhood that being from a lower caste meant that certain outcomes were the shape of the world rather than choices made within it. You found the space available and you worked in it.
His wife and son were what he worked for.
One foot slipped off the pedal into a deep puddle that turned out to have something worse than mud at the bottom.
He stopped. Looked at his foot. Decided to walk the rest of the way.
The village entrance should have had old Jai's food stall set up at the usual spot: the counter made from large flat stones, the glass box of fried dough balls inside it, the green and masala-based chutneys in their small dishes, the particular smell of frying that carried further than anything else in the village on a still afternoon. Old Jai had been there at this spot every day for as long as Jahan could remember. The stall was the reliable thing about the village entrance.
The stall was there. Old Jai was not.
Jahan stopped the bicycle and looked at the counter for a moment. The glass box was broken. The dough balls were scattered across the ground and the counter surface, soaked through and beginning to separate back into their component parts. The rain had stopped this morning, which meant the break had happened before that.
Seven days ago. Around when the rain started.
He stood there for a moment looking at the scattered food and the empty spot where a person should have been. Old Jai would not leave his stall untended. The stall was everything the man had.
Something else had happened here.
Jahan looked around the entrance. The village behind it was quiet in a way it was not usually quiet: no dogs, no cattle sounds, no voices from the houses that were visible from where he stood. He looked back at the counter and saw the saw blade that old Jai used for certain kinds of cutting, left at the edge of the surface where it had been set down and not picked back up.
Old Jai was from a lower caste, same as Jahan. The customs said that people of lower castes did not carry metal-bladed tools without specific need. The customs also said nothing about what you did when an entire village went silent in seven days of rain and an old man's livelihood was left broken and scattered on the ground.
Jahan picked up the saw blade and put it in the back of his belt.
Then he got back on the bicycle and rode into the village.
The streets were empty. The houses were shut. The mansions that the village chief's family had built on the land they had claimed over the years had their metal doors locked from the inside: he could see no movement behind the small high windows. No one stepped out to see who was riding through. No children stopped their playing to watch him pass. The silence was comprehensive.
He reached his house. It was an old building that had needed repairs for years and received them in small increments whenever there was money for materials. He and his father and his father's father had kept it standing through careful attention. The walls were thick and the roof held.
No sound came from inside.
He called out his wife's name. Then Amir's. Twice each. No response.
He pushed the door open.
The room inside was arranged the way Tina kept it: neat despite the age of everything in it, the few pieces of furniture in their places, the floor swept. She was particular about this. Even when things were difficult, the house stayed in order. It was something she had said once was the difference between being poor and being broken, and she believed it.
Jahan saw her on the floor beside the bed.
He stopped in the doorway.
She was lying still with her face turned upward, and there was a smile on her face that had nothing behind it. Her eyes were open. Her hands and feet, visible where her clothing did not cover them, were covered in blisters: some large, some small, some of them already open and weeping a greenish fluid that had the smell of something that had been wrong for a long time. Her abdomen was swollen significantly.
She was not pregnant. They had not been together for months.
Jahan stood in the doorway for a moment.
The grief and the fear came in together and he could not separate them. He did not try. He let them both be there and looked at his wife and understood that she was dead and that whatever had killed her had done it slowly and not cleanly.
Plague. The old people in the village had stories about plagues. Things that moved through communities and left everyone either dead or changed. He had always assumed those stories were about the past.
He looked around the room from the doorway and saw a figure in the corner.
Small. Crouched with its back to the room. The back of a child in the particular hunched posture of someone who has been sitting in one position for a very long time.
"Amir."
He said his son's name and crossed the room in three steps and put his hands on the boy's shoulders.
"Son. Don't be afraid. I'm home. Your mother, what happened to her? What happened in the village?"
"Dad." Amir's voice was flat in a way that should not have been possible for a child finding his father after days of being alone with his dead mother. No relief in it. No change in register. Just the word, and then more words at the same pitch. "Mom got sick. We couldn't reach you. The people in the village were afraid of getting the sickness and they wouldn't come to help us."
Jahan kept his hands on his son's shoulders.
"I was scared and sad and I didn't know what to do. I wanted to pray to the gods the way Mom taught me. I didn't expect the great gods to actually answer."
The words came out in the same flat tone as the rest. No inflection of wonder, no relief, no expression of any kind. Just the words, delivered in sequence, as if they were being recited.
Jahan's hands on his son's shoulders felt the wrongness before he could name it.
"Amir," he said. "Turn around. Let me see you."
The boy turned.
Jahan stepped back.
His son's face was swollen. The skin around his eyes and cheeks was distended in the same way Tina's had been, the same greenish fluid at the edges of the same open blisters. His arms were held out in front of him, cradling something.
The thing in Amir's arms was approximately the size of a human head. It was green, the particular shade of something that has been growing in the wrong conditions for a long time. Its surface moved, slightly, with a quality that suggested it was not quite solid and not quite liquid. It had small hands, if you could call them that, and they were reaching toward Jahan with the interest of something that had found something new.
It was laughing.
Not loudly. A low, wet, continuous sound from a mouth that was slightly open, with whispered words underneath the laughter that Jahan could almost resolve into meaning but could not quite.
Jahan stood in the small room with his dead wife on the floor behind him and his son crouched with this thing in his arms, and he did not move for a long moment.
Then his hand found the saw blade at the back of his belt, and his grip tightened around it, and he did not know what he was going to do with it but he held it anyway because it was the only thing he had.
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