Utopias of the Third Kind by Vandana Singh

Utopias of the Third Kind by Vandana Singh

Author:Vandana Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00


In the weeks and months that followed, Vikas gave up his job, changed companies and began to plan a move to a different apartment in a different part of town. His new job was not as prestigious or as well-paying as the old one had been, and Divya could tell that he was unhappy. He began to play around with an old hobby, photography, disappearing for hours sometimes on weekends, and coming back to plunge himself in the darkroom he had set up in a storeroom in the flat. He refused to talk about the terrible incident, which bothered Divya because before this she had been able to talk to him about everything. Charu had the resilience of youth; she appeared to recover quite quickly, although her school performance suffered in the months following the incident. But Divya could tell that something had changed within the child. There was a sadness about her eyes that Divya could sense even when Charu was laughing with her friends. Charu had always been a softhearted girl, but after the incident she could no longer bear any kind of cruelty, nor could she, as a consequence, watch the news without tears. Divya worried how Charu would live in the world, whether she would learn to adapt enough to survive its horrors. She feared also that Charu blamed her for the whole thing, but apart from the inevitable distancing that growth brings, there was no indication of this. There were times when the girl would come upon her mother and give her a fierce, deep hug for no reason at all, and Divya felt Charu was trying to tell her something in some other language, and that she was able to comprehend it in that other language as well.

But the change in Divya herself was perhaps the most peculiar. She had, like most mothers, always been sensitive to the needs of those she loved, but now she was able to anticipate them even before there was any evidence of them. She knew, for instance, that Charu would have her period tomorrow and that the cramps would be bad; consequently she refused to let Charu go to school that day. She knew in the morning if Vikas was going to have a bad day at work, and when Kallu the crow landed on her kitchen window with an injured wing, she knew it before he had alighted.

When she went out, however, the gift or curse that had been left for her by the old man’s death took its strangest form. When she looked upon the faces of strangers they appeared to her like aliens, like the open mouths of birds, crying their need. But most clearly she could sense those who were hungry, whether they were school children who had forgotten their lunch or beggars under the bridge, or the boot boy at the corner, or the emaciated girl sweeping the dusty street in front of the municipal building. Even in the great tide of humanity



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