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  The boys’ shoes are by the kitchen door, dried mud on them still. There is even some onion peel in that clay pot Steve used for cooking beef curry. A shaft of afternoon sun falls across the red sofa in the living room and, as always, I can see dust drifting in the beam. On the floor by the fireplace is the large bronze pot I bought in Cambodia. Malli once did a pee in it. I put my hand inside and pull out some black chess pieces. Upstairs in our study, a dead wasp on the floor, and another wobbling on the curtains, there was always a nest outside this window, and Steve and I were stung a few times. In the boys’ bedroom, a medicine spoon that looks like it was used last night, with crystals of Nurofen syrup. On our bed a few hairs, not mine, Steve’s and maybe Vik’s. Two dinosaur-shaped toothbrushes in the bathroom, and a basket of laundry, Steve’s sarong on the top.

  I want to put them back in here, I just want to put them back. They would so want to be here, they loved this house.

  This is exactly how I know our home to be. And now I find myself at ease. It feels natural, despite my protestations to myself that this is not ordinary or natural because they are not here and will never be. Before coming back here, I expected to be assailed by objects that I’d forgotten. But there are no surprises. I brace myself and open the wardrobes upstairs. Do I dare look at their clothes? Something is going to get me now surely. Cautiously, I open door after door and drawer after drawer. But it is all as I know it to be. There is not one sock that I pull out and think, I don’t remember this one. And after all the rummaging, my eyes cling to a white school shirt of Vik’s, all washed and ironed, waiting patiently on its hanger. He wore this to his school Christmas concert the night before we left London. I hesitate, then take the shirt off its hanger and hold it, feeling its softness. None of this so menacing now.

  How I relished my time alone at home back then, on those days when I was meant to be working from home and the boys were at school and Steve at the office. I would wander the house, put out the washing, make some tea, and maybe look out for the woodpecker that hammered holes in our garden shed. And here I am now, after our life ended, sitting on the floor of our living room, leaning against the sofa and staring at the tops of those overgrown apple trees with that same tranquillity stealing up on me. And I slip into my old ways, unthinkingly.

  I begin tidying up a bit, putting things where they should be, or where I always thought they should be. What’s Vik’s cricket bat doing on the mound of soft toys? I pick it up and stand it by the box with the balls and bails, that is its rightful place. And Malli’s puppets go with his dressing-up stuff. There is a bath mat by the radiator, I put it down by the shower. This laundry is clean, I should fold it. I carry the basket to the boys’ room. And then I stop myself. What am I doing? Who am I readying the house for, they are not coming back. Don’t be a fool, this is mad.

  But I can’t stop. I go into the kitchen and switch on the fridge. It doesn’t feel right without that hum. I boil the kettle for no reason. On the draining board by the sink are two thin wooden placemats, Steve and I would have used them at dinner on our last night in the house. I wipe them and stack them on the shelf. And I pick up a small faded blue plastic bowl that’s on the kitchen table. Anita and I found this in the middle of the lawn when I first walked into the garden earlier in the day. I recognized it in an instant then. It was the bowl that Vik ate his first solid food from when he was a few months old, one spoon of baby rice mixed in water. It must have become a garden toy over the years, we wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Anita was surprised to see that bowl on the lawn. It wasn’t here last evening, she insisted, she’d walked in the garden after the gardener cut the grass yesterday. So it must have been the foxes that brought it out later at night, then.

  I stare at this little dirt-covered bowl, remembering Vik kicking his legs as he spat out his first mouthful of food. And I don’t rush outside to put it away where it belongs, in the shed with the rest of the garden toys. It wouldn’t be mad or foolish to keep it indoors now.

  Sarah, Niru, Fionnuala, and I sit around my kitchen table. It is a dull autumn afternoon, the sun punctures the gray now and then. We drink tea and nibble dark chocolate, maybe expecting it to revive us a little. We are still shaken. An hour ago, when they each rang the doorbell and I opened the door to them, we couldn’t stop sobbing. We are together in my home in London after nearly four years.

  And this is what we did so often. Back then. Our children had been constants in each other’s lives, ever since Noah and Alex and Finian and Vikram were a year old maybe, ever since we wheeled them to our local library for story time. And over the years, as our children went through school together, the four of us would gather regularly to catch up on our news—about work, about home, about the play Sarah and I saw at the Donmar that week. There would sometimes be a whirl of children about us, sometimes not. Those precious school hours I should have dedicated to that paper on the macroeconomic policy in Nepal were readily sacrificed for a good gossip.

  Now we are in this same kitchen, after it has all ended. This is something I was sure we’d never do again. Even when I decided to make a second visit to our home and stay a few days, this was not part of the plan. It would be too awful, it would be too familiar, and that would be unbearable, I thought. But I’d only been back some hours when I called my friends over. And then I panicked. This will be different from when we’ve previously met up in London in these last four years. Those surroundings—the café at Foyles bookshop, that Turkish restaurant in St. John’s Wood—kept reality at bay, somewhat. But here in my home, I will be destroyed by getting too close to the life I lost.

  And I was right. We sit here, and I lapse into thinking that nothing has changed, no one has died. It is one of those afternoons when Fionnuala and I take our sons to their football class in that sports hall, which, for some strange reason, we have to enter through a locker room full of partially clothed young men who’ve just played basketball, not that we complain. Then I have to remind myself. That life is over. But how can it be? Sitting here, that seems impossible. The steam from this kettle rises and drifts towards the window above the sink, just as it always did. That tap still drips if I don’t give it an extra twist. The boys’ mud-covered shoes are reassuringly by the kitchen door, they could have just come inside. And the green and pink marks on this kitchen table from Malli’s colored pens are as bright as jelly beans.

  My friends find the house calm and inviting, no different from before. They were nervous coming back here, not knowing how they’d react. For years now, they have looked away whenever they drove past our street. Today Niru was jolted by the sight of the garden, flashes of the boys’ birthday parties we had there. Now we eat more chocolate and talk about those parties. We laugh, remembering Vik booting a ball through the window next door. We were sitting right here when we heard that shattering of glass.

  We laugh, and I am unsettled. Why do I feel this lightness? This is indeed like the old times, but it seems bearable, I am enjoying it even. Then I warn myself. I shouldn’t get too comfortable. Don’t I know that Malli will not stand on that chair again, wearing a pink tutu and licking cake mix off a wooden spoon? Steve will not come in the front door at seven, there will be no clatter as he empties his pockets onto the table in the hall. The windows next door will remain intact. Still, I am relieved to reenter the warmth of our life, even though I know that reality will get me, later.

  And right enough, it does. In the evening, the hush in this house is intolerable. I turn up the music, I talk loudly to Sarah, who is staying over, but this silence keeps ricocheting off the walls. I find myself listening out for the boys and Steve. There is a box of half-eaten chocolates on a shelf in the guest room. I can almost hear Vik and my mother whispering in that bed at night as they tuck into those chocolates, Ma ignoring my protests that the boy has already brushed his teeth. I am stunned by the quiet in the playroom. I turn on the light and see some star-shaped tinsel glistening on the floor, an entire galaxy at my feet.

>   When I lie in our bed the power of their absence assails me. The sheets have not been changed since Steve and I last slept on them. I haven’t been able to bring myself to wash them, and so I sneeze all night. Steve’s sarong still hangs on the exercise bike by the window. But his shoulder is not under my head. On Steve’s pillow, the one his head hasn’t touched in nearly four years, there is an eyelash.

  I can’t look, I pull the quilt over my face, yet I can see the four of us, crowded into this bed early on a Sunday morning. The boys have tiptoed into the room to announce at the tops of their voices that it is a sunny day. When I ignore them, Malli asks, “Why do humans need to sleep so much?” Humans was his word for adults, and we didn’t correct him, just added it to that set of garbled words that was only ours. Now those words hover in this room, unuttered. And I am alarmed, not wanting to reawaken these memories, not here at night in so much quiet. I am now thankful for these dusty sheets, at least I have my sneezing to distract me.

  In the morning I hear the squeak of floorboards. It is Sarah, already awake. I would get annoyed when Steve creaked about at six a.m. as he went between the bathroom and the study, turning on the computer, checking the NBA results from the previous night. I’d have thought this sound would unnerve me now, but this morning I find myself clinging to its familiarity, which soothes me somehow.

  It is early light, and I step into the garden. Walking barefoot on dew-sodden grass, I always loved this. Autumn is the spider season, and the shrubs are aglitter with webs. Steve and the boys would feed the spiders. They’d carefully place a live ant on these silken threads and marvel as the spider trapped it between its legs and squeezed it into pulp. “See, it sucks up the ant juice like a milkshake,” Steve told the boys. If there was an especially elaborate web, they’d implore me not to destroy it when I watered the garden.

  And there is a lovely web on the climbing rose this morning, very showy and intricate. But they can’t see it. So is it because I am hazy from sleep that I still feel a stab of wonder when I do? My desolation of last night is now dissolving, but is this just the cheer of the early sun? I wonder, but I am also certain that, for some time at least, I will keep returning to this house and to its warmth and comfort. There is a small snail edging across the table on the patio. The heat from its tiny body is thawing out the beads of frost that have studded the table overnight. It leaves a watery trail. They would be so stirred by this.

  I cower in a corner of my bed. I can barely raise my head. My stomach is clenched, my heart races, my right hand grips my left arm so tight it hurts. I shake all over, or at least it feels that way. Imagine if they could see me. They would be inconsolable.

  I stay indoors alone for days on end in my apartment in New York, where I have been living these past few months. I can’t face the sudden wintry brightness in this new city. I can’t tolerate the happy scatter of children coming out of school. I can’t bear a dimple on a small boy’s cheek. Bloody hell, Steve, I sob into my pillow, how useless are you, wherever you are, why can’t you sort this out. Just get me killed, I’ve more than had enough.

  I am as I was in those early months when I was collapsed on a bed in my aunt’s house in Colombo. But it’s four years later now, and I am startled by the intensity of this fear in me. It came upon me all at once, when I was at our home in London recently, in late October. I felt one night, with a new and terrifying force, the way in which I was flung out of our life, just like that.

  It was blustery, that night when I rifled through some papers on Steve’s desk. The windows behind me trembled, I could feel a draft on my back. Our office was tidier than it used to be, but the computer screen was tilted as always, so that in the daytime the branches of the silver maple that spread outside the window wouldn’t reflect onto it and make you squint. I always had Jazz FM turned up loud when I worked in that room. But that night there was no music, only the wind.

  The desk was piled up with Steve’s usual stuff. Pages and pages of econometric models with some coefficients circled in blue ink, a book on chess, the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, an appointment card for a haircut. I thumbed through Steve’s checkbook, which was in the drawer. He’d written three checks on our last day in London, for the gardener and the milkman and for the boys’ school dinners. Those two words, school dinners, were all it took. I shattered.

  For one thing, my mind had not even murmured those words in all these years. How could I have forgotten? How could I have shut this out? I could now hear our daily conversations. Vik telling me that he’d had sausages again at lunchtime, Malli shrugging his shoulders and walking away when I ask if he’s eaten any vegetables. And I could see Steve sitting right where I was, signing that check with the pen that is still on the desk, tearing it off and putting it in Vik’s schoolbag. I would have seen that dinner bill lying around for days and left it for him to deal with. I would have picked it up when I sat at that desk reading a chapter of a student’s thesis, stopping too frequently to read a film review on the Guardian website or to gaze at a shaft of late sun firing the redbrick chimneystacks of the houses across the street.

  But it was not simply that I had forgotten about something as commonplace as school dinners that got me that night. As I stared at the stub in Steve’s checkbook, I was held for a few moments in the coherence and safety of the life we had, when so much seemed predictable, when continuity was assumed. There would be more bills for Steve to sort out, more sunsets for me to get distracted by while he did just that. And as the wind gusted against those windows, I saw how, in an instant, I lost my shelter. This truth had hardly escaped me until then, far from it, but the clarity of that moment was overwhelming. And I am still shaking.

  They would indeed be aghast to see the mess I am now. This is not me, this is not who I was with them. I can see that me as we left London for Colombo exactly four years ago today, the eighth of December, the day Steve wrote that check and we flew out of Heathrow’s Terminal Four. Things couldn’t have been better. I had it sorted. Steve and I were impatient for the three days we would spend in a small hotel on the coast, leaving the boys to be indulged by their grandparents. We’d have the room with enormous windows that open to the ocean on three sides so the din of quickening waves smashing against rock even enters your dreams. Then the four of us and my parents would go to Yala, where the soundless feet of a baby elephant hiding under its mother’s belly as she brushes past our jeep would enthrall the boys. Steve and I were grateful our kids didn’t want to go Disneyland.

  None of that assurance now as I shudder on this bed. I recoil at my desolation. How I have fallen. When I had them, they were my pride, and now that I’ve lost them, I am full of shame. I was doomed all along, I am marked, there must be something very wrong about me. These were my constant thoughts in those early months. Why else did we have to be right there just when the wave hit? Why else have I become this shocking story, this wild statistical outlier? Or I speculated that I must have been a mass murderer in a previous life, I was paying for that now. And even as I have discounted such possibilities over time, shame remains huge in me.

  It is nearing Christmas, and I can’t join in my boys’ giddy enthusiasm. I don’t have my boys at the kitchen table writing Christmas cards to kids they’ve not spoken to all year or making greedy lists for Santa. I can’t do all those things that were normal for us and still are for countless others. And I balk at the failure that I am. Quite separate, this, from the more obvious agony of missing them.

  So I avert my eyes from the Christmas displays in the shop windows on Bleecker Street because I don’t have Malli here to be spellbound by them. Our last December I lifted him up in the London drizzle so he could see the tinkling Nutcracker exhibits outside Fortnum & Mason. But my arms are empty now, luckless mother that I am. I cross the street to avoid the smell of Christmas trees lined up for sale on the pavement near my apartment. Yet I remember our local Christmas-tree seller on Friern Barnet Road who wears a Santa hat as he does a roaring trade. One year he
also sold us a red metal stand for our tree. “This is heavy duty, it’ll last you forever, darlin’,” he told me. I saw that red stand recently, it’s still in our garden shed. I was conned. It wobbles.

  It seems shallow, my shame, all about being trounced and not having, but that’s how it is, and it won’t dislodge. My time at home in London on that visit was tinged with it. I looked in the boys’ wardrobes. They would have grown out of those clothes by now, I thought, and this felt like my defeat. It was half-term that week, and the tumble of children on trampolines filled neighboring gardens. I only had the silence indoors. So this is me now, loitering on the outskirts of the life we had.

  In Colombo, there is no home now, not even one empty of them. I want the solace of that space, and I feel dispossessed. When I go back there, I break into a cold sweat and become nauseated as I pass through our neighborhood. It is unacceptable that I can’t drive through those gates and walk into my childhood home. I know every pothole on that street, my foot goes down on the clutch, and my hand changes gear with effortless recall. My memory of the house is immaculate. But I feel expelled from there. I lost my dignity when I lost them, I keep thinking.

  I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate. I hear this occasionally. A friend will say, I told someone about you, and she couldn’t believe it was true, couldn’t imagine how you must be. And I cringe to be bereft in a way that cannot be imagined, even though I do wonder how impossible this really is. Occasionally an insensitive relative might walk away if I mention my anguish, and I reel from the humiliation of my pain being outlandish, not palatable to others.