The seventh guest of the month set his suitcase down in the drawing room without asking, and that was the exact moment Bhaskar Rao decided he would end his life by the sea. Not violently. Just slowly, deliberately, with salt in his coffee and no forwarding address.

He did not say this aloud. He watched Sharanya carry a second flask of filter decoction from the kitchen, the veins on her wrist standing out like the raised ribs of a betel leaf, and he smiled at the guest—Venkatram from Alampur, some third cousin of his elder brother’s wife—and asked whether the Kacheguda train had been on time.

“Ayyo, don’t ask, anna,” Venkatram said, sinking onto the sofa with the ease of a man reclaiming an ancestral charpoy. “The station is a bloody circus. One coolie wanted eighty rupees for a single bag. Eighty! I told him, deh, I’ll haul it on my own head before I pay a bandit.”

He had, of course, hauled it himself to the auto and reached Banjara Hills.

Mallesh the driver had lifted it from the porch while Venkatram inspected the marble, the split AC, the framed photograph of Bhaskar Rao accepting his last posting order from the Principal Secretary at the Secretariat. Venkatram’s eyes had lingered on the frame the way a hungry child looks at a laddu in a glass case—not with reverence, but with calculation.

“How long will you be with us this time, Venkatram garu?” Sharanya asked. Her voice was the exact temperature of the coffee she was pouring.

“Ten days, vadina, maybe fifteen. My son’s engineering counselling is on the third—spot admission. Then there’s the Beeramguda site—Bhaskar anna knows some Revenue people, no? A small matter of a boundary encroachment, we’ll sort it out in one evening. Then Anasuya’s daughter’s half-saree function on the twelfth, you both must come, otherwise the whole clan will not forgive us.”

Bhaskar made a sound that could pass for agreement in any court of law.

Two hours earlier, on his phone in the study, a broker in Port Blair had sent him three photographs of a bungalow at Havelock—now called Swaraj Dweep, but the broker still said Havelock the way old Hyderabadis still say Fatehmaidan for LB Stadium. In the pictures, a wooden verandah faced a shallow curve of water so pale it looked like turmeric milk left out overnight. No neighbours. No relatives. No boundary encroachments belonging to anyone else’s cousin.

Bhaskar had zoomed in on the picture until the pixels broke apart, and he had felt, for the first time in thirty five years, the sensation of breathing all the way to the bottom of his lungs.

~*~

He came out of a village whose name most autorickshaw drivers in Hyderabad could not place on a map—a cluster of tiled roofs and one tar road in undivided Karimnagar district, where the tank went dry by March and the toddy trees leaned like drunk uncles at a wedding. His father had owned six acres of black cotton soil, two acres of wet land irrigated by the village tank, and a pair of bullocks called Ramudu-Bheemudu, who were better fed than the children.

There had been twelve of them under one roof—parents, three brothers, two sisters, a widowed aunt, her two children, a grandmother who chewed tobacco and spoke only in curses, a grandfather who prudently died early, and a permanently revolving cast of second cousins whose exact relations nobody bothered to trace.

In that house the word “mine” did not exist. A shirt belonged to whoever fitted into it that morning. A plate of rice belonged to whichever hand reached it first. Bhaskar had learned to read by the light of a kerosene lamp that six other people were also using to do six other things.

He had also learned, very early, that the only way out of that lamp-light was through examinations. He wrote them the way a starving man eats—without chewing. Ninth in the district at SSC. Second in the state at Intermediate. A seat at the Regional Engineering College in Warangal on merit, hostel fees paid by a scholarship named after some long-dead zamindar. Then the TGPSC AEE exam on the first attempt, at twenty-five, with a rank respectable enough that his grandmother stopped chewing tobacco for one full day out of shock.

A stint at the London School of Economics on a mid-career fellowship, which everyone in the village pronounced “Landon” and assumed was somewhere near Dubai. Postings in Delhi, in Geneva for a UN secondment on rural water. Then back home, climbing the ladder, ending as Engineer-in-Chief in the Telangana government, retiring last March with a shawl, a silver plate, and a farewell address in which the Chief Minister called him a nijayitiparudu—a man of principles—and mispronounced his father’s name.

Along the way there had been Sharanya, arranged the traditional way, whom he had loved almost immediately and continued to love in the quiet, undramatic manner of two people who had shared a bathroom for thirty-five years. There had been a daughter, Nikhita, now a paediatric cardiologist in Toronto who called every Sunday at 8 p.m. IST and had, wisely, married a Canadian and stayed there.

And along the way there had been, always, the village.

~*~

The Vemana Shatakam verse his grandfather used to recite at the doorway on Ekadashi mornings—kulamulona nokadu gunavantudundina, kulamu velayu vani gunamu cheta—had struck him, as a boy of nine, as the most beautiful sentence in Telugu. If one man of virtue rises within a clan, the whole clan shines by his light. He had memorised it, believed it, walked into every examination hall with those syllables muttered under his breath like a mantra given by a favourite teacher.

What the poet Vemana had not mentioned—and Bhaskar now suspected the old man had left it out on purpose, out of kindness or cowardice—was what happens to the gunavantudu after he shines. What happens when the entire clan, having decided he is their lamp, begins to bring their damp wicks to him one by one for the rest of his natural life.

~*~

The demands had begun the day his selection appeared in Eenadu. A second cousin he had not seen since childhood turned up at the WALAMTARI training institute at Himayatsagar, in a cotton dhoti—to request that Bhaskar “have a word” with someone about a clerical posting in Peddapalli. Bhaskar had bought him a shirt, a bus ticket back, and given him a hundred rupees, which was one hundred more than he himself had in his pocket at the time.

That was the first wick. There had been thousands since.

His elder brother Sudhakar, who had managed the six acres of black cotton soil and two acres of wet land, had turned them into three and one by a series of decisions involving arrack and rummy. After that slow-motion disaster, he had moved his entire family into Bhaskar’s Warangal quarters for eleven months in 1998, while a house was being “constructed” in the village. The house was never constructed. Those eleven months included the birth of Sudhakar’s third child in the guest bedroom, which Sharanya had cleaned herself because the maid had left in protest.

After he was transferred to Hyderabad on a promotion, there had been the paternal uncle who required bypass surgery at KIMS and expected Bhaskar to arrange the surgeon, the room, the payment, and the transport of the extended family from the village for their daily 5-7 p.m. visits to the patient. Nineteen people had camped in the Banjara Hills flat for six days. Sharanya had cooked forty-two meals. On the seventh day the uncle died. The nineteen stayed for the tenth-day ceremony, a follow-up ceremony a couple of days later, then several of them stayed on because the mango season had started and the best Imam Pasand mangoes were available in the city.

There had been the direct requests for money. The phone calls that began with enquiries about his health and Sharanya’s health and Nikhita’s health and then, after the fourth minute, arrived at the point—Anna, Ramesh ki engineering seat vachindi, at Manipal, management quota, just four lakhs—which became six, which became eight-and-a-half when the hostel and the laptop and the “initial adjustment” were factored in. There was niece Padma’s wedding in 2011, for which her father had appeared at the Banjara Hills flat unannounced on a Sunday morning with a steel dabba of boondi laddus and a number written on a folded piece of paper—3,50,000—slid across the dining table like a quote from a contractor, eyes fixed on the floor, voice soft with rehearsed shame. Bhaskar had paid it. Then the amount for Sudhakar’s eldest daughter, and then the amount for the second daughter, each time with the same folded paper, the same floor-directed eyes, the same invocation of the dead father—ippudu nuvve nanna, you are him now—as though Bhaskar had inherited not a family but generations of obligation. Sharanya maintained a ledger. The ledger had forty-three entries spanning thirty-five years. Not one entry had a corresponding repayment.

There had been the litigation. The endless litigation. Every boundary dispute, every messy marriage, every unpaid dowry, every stolen gold chain in three villages around the ancestral one had made its way, eventually, to Bhaskar via WhatsApp—anna, oka phone chesthe chaalu, everything will be settled—as though he carried the Andhra Pradesh Land Revenue Act in his back pocket and had the High Court on speed-dial.

There had been the weddings. The happy, transactional weddings. A hundred and forty-three of them, by Sharanya’s count, in the Karimnagar-Warangal-Hyderabad triangle over three decades, at which they were expected to appear with a gift proportional to Bhaskar’s designation, sit on the dais if pushed, eat the meal, be photographed with the bride and groom, their parents and grandparents, and remember every name for future reference. To miss one wedding was to be discussed at every subsequent wedding for the next four years. Bhaskar vachhindaa? Ledu kadaa? Vaadu shaana goppodaipoyindu—Bhaskar has become too big for us now.

~*~

He had tolerated it. He had told himself, in the mirror while shaving with a Wilkinson sword blade his grandmother would have considered decadent, that this was the tax on ascent. That the gunavantudu clause of Vemana Shatakam contained an invisible sub-clause in fine print—one that Vemana had conveniently omitted—T&C apply, the lamp will be asked to burn continuously and provide light on demand until it exhausts itself.

He had told himself this until the seventh guest of the month set his suitcase down in the drawing room and asked, without looking up, whether dinner would be non-veg tonight because he had been fasting all morning on the train.

~*~

That night, after Venkatram had eaten enough mutton to feed an army and had retired to the guest bedroom with the volume on the TV set to a level appropriate for the hearing-impaired, Bhaskar sat on the terrace with Sharanya. Below them, Jubilee Hills glittered with the lights of houses in which nobody’s third cousin was ever camping without warning. The February air smelt faintly of the neem tree at the corner and the exhaust of a Zomato bike idling at the gate of the neighbouring building.

“How much for the Havelock house,” Sharanya said. Not a question.

“Ninety-two lakhs. Wooden bungalow, three bedrooms. The land is leasehold, they cannot sell outright to non-islanders, but there is a thirty-year arrangement with a local family. The broker knows an advocate.”

“Nikhita will manage the paperwork from Toronto?”

“She has already offered.”

Sharanya looked at her hands in her lap. They were the hands of a woman who had cooked for approximately a thousand uninvited people over the course of a marriage. The knuckles had thickened. There was a burn scar shaped like a comma on the base of her left thumb from a pressure cooker in 2004.

“We tell no one,” she said.

“No one.”

“Not even Sudhakar bava?”

“Especially not Sudhakar anna.”

“And when they ask where we’ve gone?”

Bhaskar considered this. Below, the Zomato bike revved and pulled away, leaving a small silence in which he could hear, distantly, the traffic on Road No. 1 at the end of their lane, which had been far quieter when they had moved into this flat in 2011.

“We tell them we are travelling. We tell them we are in Toronto with Nikhita. We tell them we’ve taken up a consultancy in Bhutan. We tell them anything except the name of an island in the Bay of Bengal.”

Sharanya did something then that she had not done in perhaps fifteen years. She laughed. Not the polite laugh she deployed at official dinners, but the sharp, unlovely laugh of a schoolgirl who has just watched a boy fall off a bicycle.

“Ninety-two lakhs to buy silence,” she said. “In our village we used to buy silence for a bottle of arrack and a chicken.”

“Update yourself, darling. The price of everything has gone up.”

~*~

The transaction took two months. Nikhita handled the advocate. The money moved in tranches through a Chennai lawyer to avoid the attention of anyone in Hyderabad. The Banjara Hills flat was not sold—that would have caused a magnitude-nine seismic event across three districts—but simply locked. Mallesh was given a generous severance and a letter of recommendation. The cook was paid three months in advance and told the sir and madam were going to visit their daughter for “some months, maybe more.”

They left on a Tuesday in July, at 4.30 a.m., in an Uber to the airport, with two suitcases each and a small wooden box containing Sharanya’s mother’s kumkuma bharani and a photograph of Bhaskar’s father seated on a cot in front of the village house, squinting at the camera as though it were a tax officer.

At the airport Bhaskar switched off his phone. Not to silent. Off. He held down the button for the full three seconds until the Samsung logo faded, and he felt, for the second time in his life, the sensation of breathing all the way to the bottom of his lungs.

~*~

Six months later.

The house at Radhanagar was smaller than the pictures had promised, as houses always are, and the mosquitoes were bigger, as mosquitoes always are on islands that tourism brochures describe as pristine. The wooden verandah faced a shallow curve of water that was, in fact, the exact pale turmeric-milk colour of the broker’s photographs, and this had turned out to be the one honest thing in the entire transaction.

Sharanya had planted mint, coriander, and tulasi in clay pots. Bhaskar had learned to identify seven species of local bird, none of which had any connection to any cousin of his. In the evenings they walked to the beach where the sand was so fine it squeaked underfoot like a mouse being stepped on very gently, and they did not speak, because after thirty-five years of marriage they had said everything worth saying and were now in the pleasant territory of not needing to.

His phone, when he switched it on once a week to check on Nikhita, contained an average of two hundred and forty missed calls, sixty voice notes, and a running WhatsApp group titled Bhaskar Anna Where Are You in which the theories had progressed from Toronto to Bhutan to some ashram to, most recently and most creatively, maybe he is having a second family in Vizag.

He read the messages the way one reads an old newspaper found lining a drawer. With mild interest and no compulsion to reply.

~*~

On a Sunday evening in January—the coldest month in Hyderabad, and the most pleasant on the islands—Bhaskar sat on the verandah with a coconut in his hand from which the vendor had cut the top with a machete stroke so casual it had seemed almost rude. The sun was going down behind the water in the vulgar, unrepentant way that tropical suns do, painting everything the colour of a ripe pomegranate.

Sharanya came out with two plates of pesarattu she had made from moong dal she had carried, in defiance of all baggage regulations, from Hyderabad.

“Nikhita rang,” she said. “Sudhakar bava has been trying her number. He wants to know if we’re dead.”

“What did she say?”

“She said we are quite well, thank you, and that we’ve taken up new hobbies.”

“What hobbies did she invent for us?”

“Bird-watching, for you. For me, she said I was learning to paint.”

Bhaskar considered his wife, who had never held a paintbrush in her life and considered any activity that did not produce edible output to be a form of madness.

“Are you going to learn to paint?”

Sharanya tore a piece of pesarattu, dipped it in the ginger chutney, and chewed thoughtfully.

“No,” she said. “But if he asks, I have painted three landscapes and one still life.”

They ate. The sun completed his performance and left the sky the tender bruised colour of a boy’s cheek after his first slap. Somewhere in the coconut palms a bird made a noise that resembled a badly tuned harmonium.

Bhaskar set down his plate. He thought, briefly, of the boy of nine standing at the doorway of a tiled house in Karimnagar district, reciting kulamulona nokadu gunavantudundina to a grandfather who was not really listening. He thought of the sub-clause the poet had omitted. He thought of the seventh guest of the month setting a suitcase down in a drawing room in Jubilee Hills at the exact moment a life ended and another life began.

Then he thought of nothing at all, which was, he had discovered late in life, the finest thing a man could think.

Sharanya reached across and took a piece of pesarattu from his plate without asking, the way people who have known each other a very long time take things from each other’s plates. She chewed it. She looked at the water.

“The last ferry,” she said, “reaches here at six.”

“Yes.”

“Nobody we know is on it.”

“No.”

She smiled a small private smile that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a woman finally alone with her own life, and she said, in the perfect Karimnagar Telugu of her girlhood which she had not used in decades because it had been beaten out of her by Delhi and Geneva and the Banjara Hills Ladies Club, “Inka evval raaru”—nobody will come.

No one is coming for us anymore.

The bird in the coconut palm made its harmonium sound again. Somewhere, very far away, a WhatsApp group was gaining new members.

Bhaskar Rao closed his eyes and, for the third time in his life, breathed all the way to the bottom of his lungs.