Hello, she called out, is someone there? My scooter broke down and I’m stuck. Please, can you help me?
The whispering behind the window stopped. The silence filled the sound’s absence.
I know there’s someone there, Diya said. I heard you. Please, can you help me?
After a pause, Diya heard a woman’s voice. Go away, it said. It sounded less like a command and more like an entreaty.
Leave me be, please, the voice continued. I cannot help you.
Diya felt her skin prickle with anxiety, her breath quicken with the beginnings of desperation. The only person she’d located did not have any interest in helping her.
The curtain shifted and Diya could make out a single fearful eye peering at her, still standing there, not having left. She held up her hands, a gesture of surrender.
Please, Diya said, I’m not here to hurt you.
Another long pause and then the curtain was drawn, revealing a woman with a navy blue shawl draped over her head and held over her face. From her hands and the slight bend to her back, Diya could tell the woman was elderly, but couldn’t discern any features or facial expression. Diya could make out a bed and almirah in the room behind her, a family portrait hanging on the wall to her left.
Look, Diya said, you have a daughter, right? Wouldn’t you want someone to help your child if they were stuck somewhere?
The hand holding the woman’s shawl to her face dropped to her chest. The woman’s hair was almost fully white but her face bore no lines, no signs of age.
How do you know I have a daughter? The woman’s voice was high and pained.
Diya pointed to the portrait.
Yes, the woman said, low and soft, almost to herself. She’s a bit older than you but you look like her, you know.
I just need to borrow a phone, Diya said. That’s all and then I’ll be gone.
The woman cracked open the window enough to pass her cell phone through.
Come around front when you’re done, she said, shutting the window. You can leave the phone there.
Diya made her call and then walked to the front door as instructed. As she rounded the corner she saw that the woman had placed a bottle of water and a plastic plate of stale biscuits on the ground. With the more urgent problem now solved, she remembered her hunger. She ate and drank and then left the woman’s phone on the plate.
*
It had been ill-advised to borrow the scooter; it belonged to an award-winning photojournalist Diya had previously known only in passing. She knew his photographs first, of course, immediately recognizable as his, images so beautifully composed as to seem staged, though they were of moments impossible to orchestrate.
She’d read somewhere that he was on assignment in her (grand) mother’s city, and soon after her arrival there, on an open-ended whim to freelance but also desperate for company, she’d looked him up and messaged him for a drink. He had just finished an assignment following paranormal researchers into places no one, including the photojournalist, wanted to go. He said the researchers liked to tell of a previous cameraman who’d accompanied them, who had pissed himself after a series of unspeakable events in a decrepit seaside colonial fort. It was intended to be regarded as a great kindness that no one had commented on the puddle accumulating by the man’s feet at the time, but left unexamined that they continued to relay the story to others after the fact, years later, and here was the photojournalist now telling it to her.
What brings you to the city? he’d asked, returning her question. Do you have family here or some connection to this place? He was sitting sidesaddle on a barstool and facing her, making sustained eye contact. She felt like a bug ready to burn under a magnifying glass.
No, she said. I was sort of between things so thought I’d spend some time here, try to pick up a few jobs. Diya didn’t say that the things she was between were her grandmother’s death and whatever lay beyond, more stages of grief and a future she’d never, even prior to her life’s accumulating losses, envisioned clearly. That she thought simply being in this place, long ago abandoned by her grandmother and mother, might spur the kind of revelation that gave a life purpose.