To Forget and Be Forgotten

Kavitha looked at her the way she looked at most things - directly, without apology.

"You're out early," she said.

Not a question exactly. Just an observation placed in the air between them, waiting to see what Seren did with it.

"I couldn't sleep," Seren said.

"Bad dream?"

The question came out casually, the way Kavitha asked most things - without softening the edges, without the particular social performance of pretending not to have noticed something. She had noticed. She was asking. That was all.

Seren looked at the kolam on the ground between them rather than at Kavitha.

"Something like that."

Kavitha accepted this without pushing further. She crouched briefly to check one edge of the design - a curve that had come out slightly uneven - and smoothed it with the tip of her finger.

"You were watching for a while," she said.

It wasn't an accusation. Just another observation.

"I didn't mean to stare," Seren said. "I was passing and I - the pattern caught my attention."

Kavitha stood back up, looking down at the finished kolam with the mild satisfaction of someone who had completed a task to an acceptable standard.

"Kolam," she said. "Every morning. My mother did it before me. Her mother before her." She paused. "I wake up at four-thirty. It's the only hour in this city that belongs entirely to itself."

Seren understood that more than she could say.

"It's precise work," she said instead.

"It disappears by afternoon." Kavitha said it without sadness. Just fact. "Feet, wind, the day happening. Gone by evening. You draw it again tomorrow."

She looked up at Seren then - something in her expression shifting slightly, the way it sometimes did in the classroom when she was adding something up quietly.

"A professor jogging through my neighborhood at five in the morning because of a nightmare," she said. The corner of her mouth moved. "That's not something I expected to see today."

"I didn't expect to see a kolam being drawn either," Seren said. "We're even."

Kavitha almost smiled at that.

They stood in the early quiet for a moment. The sky above the rooftops had shifted from dark blue to something lighter - the particular color that belonged to neither night nor morning, the hour Seren had always found both peaceful and unbearable.

"Do you have them often?" Kavitha asked.

"What?"

"Bad dreams."

Seren looked at her.

There was no particular weight in the question - Kavitha wasn't probing, wasn't performing concern. She was simply asking the way she asked everything, directly, because she wanted to know and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

"More than I'd like," Seren said.

Something almost slipped through after that - a sentence that started forming before she caught it. Something about how long she had been carrying certain things. About how some mornings the only way to stop the ceiling from feeling like a weight was to put her feet on the ground and move.

She stopped it before it became words.

Kavitha nodded slowly, as if the answer confirmed something she had been quietly noting for weeks.

"The dreams or the not sleeping?" she asked.

"Both."

"Mm." Kavitha looked back down at the kolam. "My brother used to say the same thing. After he came back." She said it the way she sometimes said things about Arjun - evenly, carefully, the words placed down like objects that needed to be handled without being examined too closely. "He said the only thing that helped was being somewhere the day had already started."

Seren was quiet.

"Does it help?" Kavitha asked. "The jogging."

"Sometimes," Seren said. "Today it led me here."

She hadn't meant to say that last part.

Kavitha looked at her - a fraction longer than the conversation strictly required. Something in her expression that Seren couldn't fully read and didn't try to.

Then the sound of movement inside the house. A door. Someone else waking up.

Kavitha glanced back over her shoulder.

"I'm running late," she said, picking up the empty bowl from the doorstep. She looked back at Seren once. "See you at college, Professor."

She went inside.

The door closed softly behind her.

Seren stood alone on the quiet street with the kolam at her feet - white and intricate and already beginning to catch the first pale light of morning.

She stood there a moment longer than she needed to.

Then she turned and walked back the way she had come.