I dream of being a mermaid regularly.

Cold, golden scales. Turquoise, blue water.

Clear water meant to quench the thirsts of a thousand broken men. Water meant to wash the tired feet of a thousand tired women. This water does not taste like the vast, indefinite sea that so many sailors and love sick worriers have written poems about. No, I belong to glacial water, I belong to the footsteps of the mountains.

I dream that I can walk on land too, my fins become limbs at will. I climb impossibly tall, red and green trees to pick fruits no human has ever seen. Fruits that are orange, pink, blue— just like the sky.

But that is all a dream, I always wake up to a grey world. I am a human without nimble limbs to climb tall trees or lungs designed to breathe under water.

 Yet every human must try to do what they can. I try to fumble through my day but with grace. I try to be heard, I try to mumble with articulacy.

And today, I have tried to look good for Pukesh whose house I can see from my flat’s rooftop; an old Rana building, I can see his endless garden. I imagine him getting lost often. He whizzes past me every morning in his red sports car while I wait for my bus. He runs past me every evening without paying attention to anyone. Recklessly, he runs across the streets without looking for traffic. He’s a stereotype: tall, sculpted, rich, spoilt.

But he has morose brown eyes, the dark circles around them only make the sadness in his eyes more prominent.

He doesn’t seem to mind the eyes following him, the children snickering, the old men and women pointing. He drives everywhere anyway, and other times, he is too focused on his running—his breathing steady, back straight, shoulders relaxed—to worry about the real world.

 This is new to me because I usually fall for shorter men with kinder eyes. I also don’t usually fall for men who are twenty-five years older than I am but my sister, Lalita, tells me not to worry about that. Instead, she says, I should worry about his constant drinking, his chain smoking, his frequent visits to casinos.

Not that it matters to me. My love always fades. I don’t want anything from him. I don’t want tender kisses or touches or gifts or the prospect of a fling or marriage; all I want from him is his existence. I want to look at him from afar, from the corner of my eye. I don’t want to alarm him or make him feel uncomfortable.

If I observe him too noticeably, it will affect his behaviour. He will change, move slightly to the right, tighten his shoulders, forget to pace his breathing.

 I want him to exist just as he is.

“Why are you looking pretty for him if you don’t even want him to notice you?” Lalita asks exasperated, yet she gently touches my mustard silk saree and smiles.

“Japanese silk”

 “I didn’t say I didn’t want him to notice me. I just don’t want him to notice me noticing him. There’s a difference, Didi.” I only call her Didi when I want to end a conversation, and she knows this, “You always know what type of material it is.”

“I don’t trust the look of that man. He has a different woman keeping him company every night, all younger women who wear far too much makeup for their own good. Like you. You can’t control your age but why do you have to wear so much makeup?”

I snicker, “And who told you this little fable?”

I press my ear against the silence; she looks at me with a knowing look.

“You’re listening to that Tulachan Baje now?” I cross my arms “The man’s bored. He’ll say anything about anyone. You know that. He has nothing to do, business is slow since they opened the Big Mart right across his shop. Plus Pukesh is a grown man, who are we to talk about his life?”

“I don’t care about how many women he sleeps with. I just don’t want that drunk to sleep with you. If Tulachan finds out, all our neighbours will.”

“I doubt Pukesh even knows who Ajay Tulachan, the lonely low life, is”

“But you do, you moron!” She says, exasperated once again. She wants to say something more but her mobile rings, playing an orchestral tune. She shows me the screen, sighs and ignores her husband’s call.

 Her Canadian husband doesn’t care about Japanese silk. He says he’s outgrown kites, says he’s too old to learn Nepali. He doesn’t worry about earthquakes.

I kiss her on her forehead, gently nudge her hair behind her ear. I feel like the older sister, sometimes.

 I make my way to the cafe that lies on Pukesh’s running route. He’s always punctual, so I have to train myself to be early.

I order a strawberry smoothie and wait.

***

Lalita and Aidan found each other at work, grim and depressed. They worked, and still work, for an INGO that’s meant to alleviate hunger in the developing world. But all it does, of course, is make its employees richer and fatter.

Sometimes, when it got too grim and depressing, they tried to forget about the world. They flew kites on his rooftop then they locked their bedroom door. Lunch time escapades, Lalita called them.

We started living in Nahartole when Lalita and I first moved to Kathmandu. We haven’t left since. I was young, a biology student with no interest in biology. She had just started earning. She slept at three every night, I diligently topped all my classes in university.

 That is how I became acquainted with Tulachan, at first he was kind to my sister. Even reverent of her, her money, her blue-plated office car.

But after the earthquake took his home, he changed. His sneer reached my core, his judgment permeated my quiet life. I was the younger sister of a rich INGO woman who was having an affair with a white man.

I stopped shopping at his store but Lalita felt the weight of unknown eyes on her spine. She had to get married, she wanted to too.

After she did, I moved in with Lalita and her husband which lied diagonally to the left of our old apartment.

I sensed that Lalita’s husband, ‘Raja’ as our relatives called him, didn’t like me much. He laughed at my English, the way I dressed, the way I burned everything I cooked, the way I liked my tea very sweet. I reciprocated it. I trained myself to hate his shadow. But all that did was cause me grief.

 I was staying in their house and he was older, therefore I remained quiet. All I could do was sneer and mutter under my breath. I became addicted to that hate, till it attached itself to the fabric of my being.

I stopped sleeping, had wild headaches, but I managed to graduate at the top of my class because I wanted to prove that I could.

My headaches would only go away if I was close to the water, so I pursued it.

I started dreaming of becoming a mermaid regularly. Sometimes literally, sometimes not.

I tried swimming but I hated the exercise and the chlorine. I caved in and took up a job under Polish environmental biologists. I worked under a specialist exploring fish ecosystems in high altitude lakes. Suddenly, I loved biology.

 I saw one beautiful lake after the other. Turquoise blue lakes spread out below pink, blue skies that challenged my grey world notion. Maybe life was a dream.

Life was not a dream at home, the headaches always came back. But I was always glad to see Lalita. Lalita was oblivious to all that was going on in her house. She thought ‘Raja’s’ constant barrage of criticism stemmed from good natured teasing and my silence in his presence stemmed from respect. Neither he nor I ever dared contradict her. Instead, I saved up enough to move out.

“Why do you need to find a place of your own? You travel so much, there is no point. It’s just a waste of your money” Lalita begged me to stay. I, instead, rented a place close to her. The fish never travels far from her nest.

I may have hated him but even I could see how much he loved Lalita. He was always brushing her hair away from her face, gently tucking it in behind her ears.

But eventually, Lalita didn’t want love. I came back from one of my trips to find Lalita shriveled up. She had lost a lot of weight, quickly. At 32, her blood pressure shot up, uncontrollably.

She submitted her resignation letter.

She aged years, Lalita began counting the newly formed lines on her forehead. All she could talk about was death. Lalita’s health worsened everyday but it wasn’t something physical that did this to her.

While I was away, Lalita attended a relative’s cremation. She passed away at 95 but Lalita couldn’t help but notice a young woman’s body being brought in for her final rites. She wore a blood red saree underneath the white cloth that encapsulated her limbs like a new born baby.

“She was about your age” She had smiled at me sadly, as she has always done.

The young woman’s father, an old, disheveled man with red eyes and boozy breath sat close to Lalita and our cousins. He screamed and cursed. No one from their side came to calm him.

Lalita didn’t tell me much.

“He slurred too much, I couldn’t understand him but apparently the woman, Mira, was married off at a young age. She escaped her abusive first husband and eloped with another man.”

But, the second husband was nowhere to be found, the first performed the final rites.

“That man’s drunken breath is imprinted on me for the rest of my life. However short or long that may be,” she dismissed my consolations.

It all seemed bleak to her. Being loveless, being loved, having children, dying young, being loveless again right before her ashes could fly off to the ether, could be washed away to the river.

She became acutely aware of her love and, her money. What had she ever done for freedom?

But what about me?  I knew I better search for that river, for that lake, for any water body, any fresh water lake, raging whitewater river. I will settle for saline water, even for chlorine water if I must. That’s what I thought to myself. That and nothing more.

But, I hadn’t considered the fact that humans are 65 percent water. Until I saw Pukesh near the pool, that is. His friend threatened to push him in. He went red in the face as his shoulders tensed up, he backed away; he couldn’t swim.

***

I had fallen in love before, multiple times. But this was different. I know my heart is still fickle but for now, I travel less. I think less of escape and more about what colour to wear for him. I have no room in my mind for headaches.

Over time, Lalita’s blood pressure normalised. She gained back some weight but she was never the same. She barely looked at her husband and worried about me constantly.

Aidan, at 36, began balding, quick. He got drunk on cheap rum one day and began crying while Lalita slept in the other room. He told me her eyes aged him, his job aged him. He drew circles in the air while trying to find some sort of pattern to keep him sane.

“It’s not sadness, it’s pity. No love, no desire, only pity. She thinks I’m a coward.”

After that, Aidan didn’t talk to me much. I began to think maybe all this while he had only been teasing me. In a few months, he gained all of Lalita’s lost weight, stopped tucking Lalita’s hair behind her ears. Worked harder, grew richer. That’s when he outgrew kites.

I try to forget about the world as I drink my strawberry smoothie. I catch a glimpse of Pukesh. He slows down his running, jogs in the same place. Walks up to me.

“How are you doing, Anju? Tulachan Baje was telling me that you work with fish scientists now. I looked it up, Ichthyology. What a difficult word.”

 He asks if he could have a sip of my pink, pink strawberry smoothie.

Sweat drips down his forehead as he compliments my mustard yellow saree. My cheeks flush, I feel like I am breathing under water. The sky quickly changes from day to dawn.

I’d never seen sadder eyes. Or a kinder smile.

I remember Lalita’s contorted face when she told me about Aidan’s threats to jump off a bridge.

“There will be a divorce,” she had snarled.

 It’s a pity. All of it is.