We all love to drink chai, but not the same kind and not the same amount. For instance, Auntie can’t consume a whole cup –– she is too old for that –– so she sips until the chai stirs up her acid. Then she dashes to the kitchen drawers for the antacid, cursing the one who prepared the chai that burned her food pipe and the menopause that burns her feet at night, worsening her insomnia. Some of us like our chai brimming with frothy milk, becoming creamy beige, while others like it strong, the mix of water and milk simmering with tea powder, ginger and cloves for so long that the chai loses its colour and turns chocolate brown. Meena can drink only black chai. She is allergic to both milk and ginger. Not really allergic because she has never had them in a chai, but she claims she will barf if she does. Her father used to have ginger chai every morning to cure his hangover. He kicked her if the chai didn’t explode with the intense flavours of both milk and ginger, so she stood by the stove peeling one ginger wedge after another until her nose began to bleed.  

And Baby, she doesn’t drink chai, though she wants to. Auntie says she is too young for that.  

Baby is not her real name. None of us use our real names, and some of us don’t remember the names our parents gave us.  

But Simmy is different; she has no real name. She was found a naked newborn crying in a dumpster, her puckered fingers clutching a rotten banana peel, her only possession. 

We live on the top floor of an old building that used to be a tobacco factory on the outskirts of New Delhi. Our floors creak and the walls peel. The brick stacks shine from beneath the peeling plaster. If we remove a few loose bricks from a wall of the dining room, we can see down the utility shaft of our building, where the motors of the flats rumble at dawn, upsetting the dreaming pigeons that coo and flutter, forgetting that this occurs daily. Birds have a poor memory, and so does our downstairs neighbour, Mrs Braganza, who talks to her dead son daily. We don’t think he replies from the other side, though we can’t be sure.  

After our morning chai we gather in the living room and listen to Auntie’s stories while Baby stands behind her and plucks out her grey hair. When Baby pulls a black strand, Auntie screams and twists backward to slap her, at which Baby laughs because no one has slapped her this lightly before. This doesn’t even feel like real hitting, she says. We laugh that Auntie is getting old and can’t even intimidate a child. Auntie sighs, reminiscing when both men and women were terrified of her.  

Which men? we ask. 

There were some, Auntie says. 

If they feared you, they couldn’t have been real men, we say.  

Men can be scared too, you know, says Auntie. They are just good at hiding it. What about Mrs Braganza’s boy? Worked in a respectable office, wore a tie and still jumped off the roof. Wasn’t he so scared of life that he embraced death? 

He was scared of life, not a woman, we say.  

Auntie says, Changing the source of fear doesn’t alter its intensity or consequences. 

We shrug and debate the gender of life. Earth is feminine, and the sun is masculine in Hindi grammar, so those of us who have attended at least elementary school argue that life should be female and death male, at least by the standards of Hindi. And isn’t Yamraja, the god of death, a male, according to our scriptures? 

Auntie laughs. The god of death? You girls should know better. You should know what a myth is and what is reality.  

What is reality, Auntie? We ask. 

In front of our building is a community park. At dawn, the sparrows chirp, and as the sun slithers up the sky, the honking of cars and scooters from the adjacent road drowns the sparrows’ music. When grass begins to sizzle in the heat, the children are released from school. Soon, the buoyancy of the wind ruffles a girl’s skirt or a boy’s tresses as they swing high to kiss the sky. With our noses pressed against the glass, we watch them from our living room window. An ice cream peddler and a toy seller ring their bicycle bells by the park gates to lure the children outside. Later, the toy seller enters the park, carrying a burlap sack on his shoulder, big enough to conceal a child. He squats under the neem tree and, on his folded burlap sack, arranges rows of windup monkeys, toy trucks and plastic dolls with blond hair.  

Baby has a dirty doll with one leg and a torn dress that she drags everywhere. Many of us have played with it. We promise Baby a new doll when we have money. A doll with curling eyelashes and hazel eyes, her skin scented with fresh plastic, untouched by many hands. We earn almost every night but don’t have much left after Boss’s share. But one day, things will be different, we promise Baby. We will get her all the dresses and dolls she desires. We will get the magic oil that cures all pain for Auntie’s knees. We will get a smile for Tina and watch her small eyes disappear into their sockets with her mouth widened. We all earn, but Baby — she doesn’t earn anything. She is too young for that.  

Some of us have been living with Auntie for a long time, some not too long, but she knows our sacred marks, and we all have at least one. For instance, Tina’s right shoulder blade –– unhinged from a clobbering when she refused to strip for the first time. When she cries, the blade dances on her back to the tune of her sobs. Meena’s left thigh –– sore from cigarette burns over a decade ago. Some days she won’t stop screaming until Auntie puts an ice pack on it to bury the burning. Simmy’s head –– explodes as she cries in her sleep and calls for a mother who threw her out in a dumpster, loosely wrapped in a newspaper. Ria’s hair –– her long, lush, black hair that she doesn’t allow anyone to touch. Her grandmother used to comb through it with her fingers under the dais of a peepal tree in her village, humming a hymn about a prince and a princess and their happily ever after; with eyes closed and curled up, Ria sailed in her dreams, cocooned in her grandmother’s lap. 

Everyone calls Auntie Neena Gaonkar. In an old picture above her bed, she has a large red bindi on the forehead, vermilion powder in the hair partition and a black beaded necklace. Now, she wears pastel sarees bereft of any signs of a married Hindu woman. Our neighbours assume she must be a widow, that there indeed had been a gentle Mr Gaonkar, a bald, stout man who wouldn’t complain if asked to return to the vegetable market because he forgot to buy mint leaves and lemons the first time.  

But what no one knows is that after Boss’s men leave, screaming at Auntie and sometimes kicking her, she pulls out a rusty trunk reeking of naphthalene balls from under her bed and takes out a battered bible and a laminated picture of Jesus Christ. Holding them to her bosom, she kneels on the floor and crosses herself.  

Despite this, we don’t know if Auntie is religious because whenever we ask her if she believes in God, she shrugs and says, I haven’t met Him yet, but He must be somewhere because I have already met the devil.  

We can’t go out. Those who did haven’t returned. Auntie says we are safe as long as we stay together. Auntie sometimes goes out to the nearby market if she doesn’t like the vegetables or spices delivered to us. She likes to lightly squeeze tomatoes and pierce bottle gourd with her nails to test their pliancy before buying. She rolls turmeric root between her palms to gauge the powder that can be extracted from it. When she has money to spare, she buys a new saree for us to share. She hides it in her petticoat when climbing the stairs and pants so loudly that a neighbour’s dog barks in irritation.  

We know Boss’s men are watching, always. They could be beneath our petticoats hanging on the clothesline on the terrace or buried behind a newspaper on the park bench. They could be the boy who delivers milk every day or groceries every week, craning his neck to peek inside the bedrooms and gawk at crumpled bed sheets. They could be the bearded, one-legged beggar who asks for spare change at the red light, turning his head every so often to gaze at our building. They could be that middle-aged man who walks by the park swinging his arms to crack his joints, glancing up at the fourth floor or the sky beyond. 

Most of us have been sent here because someone needed money. Auntie says we are like those tiny jigsaw puzzle pieces that can get easily lost or broken, but without them, the puzzle picture will not emerge. She says, unbeknownst to us, we have completed many pictures –– a father squeezing a lemon in his drink having refilled his booze supply, a mother wiping her tears while filling her scrawny son’s mouth with balls of pearly rice, a stepmother flashing her new gold bangles at her brother’s wedding, an emaciated uncle closing his eyes in hope as the expensive chemo infusion invigorates his veins.  

Some of us came because we got lost. Lost in a dark alley where even our shadows wouldn’t hesitate to assault us. Lost in a sunny and busy fair where our screams died in the mirth of others. Lost in the roughness of a burlap sack. Lost in the mustiness of a car trunk. Lost with rats burrowing into our skin in a dumpster. Lost in an attic with no windows or doors where your own hand hoods up like a cobra about to sink its fangs into your heart.  

A few of us came because we needed to be cured, punished or maybe both. Like Tina, who liked to cut her hair short, wear her brother’s shirts and who kissed a girl in school. Her family was appalled. They promptly removed her from their reputable village and handed her over to an uncle to cure her.  

She has been cured, she says, because she can’t ever look at a girl the same way.  

One of us was sent after she was found naked with a boy on a farm. What ailment does she have? we ask. At least it was not a girl they found her with. 

The boy was the son of a higher-caste prosperous farmer whose land her father tilled. The farmer thrashed her father with an iron rod and, labelling her a whore, banished her from the village. Alone, she wandered the highway until a truck driver with piercing eyes like a tiger noticed her one night. 

The only person whose reason for coming we don’t know yet is Ria. She sits by the window and combs her long shiny hair with her fingers and hums in the voice of her grandmother, whom she calls Dada. This is strange, we say. Why do you call your grandmother that? That is what a grandfather should be called. 

She smiles and keeps humming. We don’t say any more to her because we know we have lost her. She is back at the mango grove in her village where she gathers fallen mangoes in her skirt. Later, she will sit with Dada on the brick wall of the tube well, legs dangling, each sucking a ripe Dussehri, their palms, chin and neck glowing golden with the juice while behind them lurks a bucket full of bobbing mangoes. 

Some days, we quarrel, and when we don’t listen to Auntie and keep our voices down, she brings out her whip. But she has never used it, not as long as we can remember, though she says she has used it on the girls before us. When we ask where they are now, Auntie stares at the gap between the loose bricks of the dining room wall.  

Sometimes, our clashes are about fathers. At the mention of father, Meena spits on the tile which angers Auntie. She says, How many times I’ve told you to spit only in the sink? 

When some of us call our fathers monsters, Diti shakes her head swiftly as if trying to erase our words and sentiments from the air and screams, No. No. No. She curls up on the tile, rocks back and forth, and sobs. Papa. Papa. Papa. 

When Diti couldn’t sleep, her father carried her in his arms to the terrace and showed her the celestial illumination beyond the hard shell of the sky. They watched Orion and the Great Bear. They made their own constellations, an image of a mother she never had, an image of a god she never met. Sometimes on a clear night, she shuffles to our narrow terrace and whispers, Papa. She hears something back because she smiles and nods.  

We have never seen Boss. Some of us have a hazy memory of a big man barking orders and counting bills as he assessed us from top to bottom and front to back before shoving us toward someone else. But Auntie says that was not Boss. Boss is a dragon that spews fire from his mouth, and if we had seen him, we would have turned blind. On hearing this, Baby wants to see him. She wants to tame the dragon and fly on its back. She says she will bring her doll with her, and together they will sail along the clouds and swim in the sky.  

Auntie pulls Baby into her lap and kisses her forehead. Baby waves her doll, and Auntie also kisses the doll’s forehead. 

Each fortnight, Boss’s men come to collect the earnings. They peruse the logbook and bicker with Auntie. Do you know how much the rent is? Do you know how much their groceries, sarees and lipsticks are? And the pills?  

Auntie says, Every paisa is accounted for. Check the logbook again. 

The men won’t shake Auntie’s bosom because she is not young anymore, but if they do, rolls of hundreds will shower on their heads.  

Don’t take us for a fool, woman. Why is the total not tallying with the entries? Do you want us to upend this goddamn place and find the missing bills? 

Auntie slams her forehead with her hand, saying, Looks like I forgot to count the bills right and have been cheated. Must be my failing memory.  

The men kick her and stuff their pockets with cash. Take care of your memory, woman; otherwise, we’ll find another ‘Mrs Nancy Gaonkar’ to replace you. Your likes have no other use, anyhow. 

When the men arrive, we scamper into our bedrooms and watch from behind the doors. Often, the men ignore us, but occasionally, they call us to line up. Count our fingers and toes. Smell our hair and skin. Stare at Baby for a long time. They glare at Auntie and say, Looks like you’re keeping them happy. Too much happiness can’t be good for them.  

Auntie stays quiet and looks down at the tiles that hold her feet together. 

And then one morning, he comes. Some of us find him smelly like the buffaloes we had on our parents’ farm whom we milked at dawn, collecting frothy milk in aluminium tubs. Some of us find him smelly like the cow dung we rolled on our palms and then dried as cakes on the mud wall of our parents’ backyard. Meena finds him smelling like her father when he urinated on himself before passing out on the floor each night.  

He is short and he limps, dragging a useless leg behind him like a dead seal. With his crumpled threadbare shirt and sweaty armpits, we assume him to be one of the new delivery men, but he carries no basket of fruits or can of flour on his shoulder. We are busy cleaning dishes, washing our sarees, mopping the floor and telling a story to Baby. We ignore him until we see him slipping into Auntie’s room and closing the door behind him. Sitting on the bed, Auntie is massaging her hair with coconut oil. We gather outside her room and listen. Unlike the other Boss’s men, he is quiet, but we catch his few phrases. Five girls. The youngest. Thailand, Malaysia, Dubai. No, not much time. Pack stuff. Stop crying. Not the first time. What do you mean, why your girls?  

The door opens and he hobbles out. We scurry to the bedrooms. He doesn’t see us. Next to our main door is a full-length mirror. He stops to inspect the pockmarks on his cheeks, spits in his palm and runs it through his receding hair. 

After he leaves, Auntie comes out of her room and collapses onto the sofa, asking us to switch on the ceiling fan. Her eyes are red and her cheeks glisten. We sit around her, and Baby jumps into her lap. 

We ask, Auntie, who is he? 

She thinks for a while and says, They want some of you to go far away. She points to an imaginary point on a wall to her right. 

Where? we ask. 

Oh, I don’t know all the names. Thailand, Dubai, places very far from here. Her hand remains suspended in the air at that point. 

Those of us with secondary education say, Auntie, Thailand and Dubai are on opposite sides. We point to our right and left and say, One is in the east, and the other is in the west.  

Auntie shakes her head. They are all on the same side.  

Baby wraps her arms around Auntie’s neck. But I won’t leave you.  

Auntie hugs her tighter and whispers, But they said you will be the first one. 

We begin to prepare for his return. Auntie says we are like shirt buttons, the little accessories neglected beyond their functionality in the textile world. But if we choose to fall on the floor and roll under a couch or bed, we can bring our master on all fours as he flounders on the floor to find us. Our power is in our obstinacy. We can frustrate our master every morning if we choose not to yield to his fingers and break his nails with our tenacity. Together, we can cover his shame or expose his nakedness. 

We decide to stay together and refuse to yield to their proposal. Auntie says we generate a lot of money, and even though we will upset them, they probably won’t do much.  

Baby clutches her doll and says, But what if they do something?  

We all look at Auntie, but she doesn’t say anything. She opens her arms wide and smiles, and we all rush to her.  

He returns in two weeks. Sitting on her bed, Auntie breaks walnuts with her hands in a bowl when he enters her room and closes the door behind him. He is very quiet, so we hear mostly Auntie. She says, No one is going anywhere.  

We hear his muted words. Allow? You? Today. Van waiting downstairs.  

Didn’t you hear? No one is going anywhere today or tomorrow or ever, yells Auntie. A brick falls from the dining room wall. We wonder if it fell on a running motor, silencing it, or on a lizard basking in a motor’s shadow in the shaft, crushing it.  

Again, his reply is too soft to decipher; all we hear is ‘regret’. Baby asks what regret is. We tell her to forget that word.  

This time, we stay put when he steps out of Auntie’s room. We surround him from all sides. One of us has Auntie’s whip. Baby has picked up a kitchen knife, and that surprises us. Auntie doesn’t allow her in the kitchen to shield her from the dangers of knives and fire. He turns to look at Auntie’s room and says calmly as if announcing a meeting conclusion, You will regret this.  

Meena walks up to him and spits on his face. He doesn’t look at her. He takes a folded cotton handkerchief from his pant pocket and wipes his cheek which now glows like a flaming meteor. 

Baby brandishes the knife at him. He doesn’t look at her either. Sliding between Meena and Baby, he walks to the mirror next to the main door, and this time, without seeing his reflection in it, straightens his shirt, fixes his hair with his fingers and leaves.  

If he had looked in the mirror, he would have seen us all as we assembled behind him, our faces burning with fury and our eyes fiery red. 

First, it is the smell of someone’s hair burning. Then it is Simmy’s screams after which the hazy smoke waters our eyes, prickles our noses and fills up our throats. We are scrambling around Auntie’s bed. She is groggy from her sleeping pills, coughing and pulling up Baby and her doll who are sleeping soundlessly next to her.  

We say, We can’t open the main door. It’s locked from the outside.  

We say, Now we can’t even reach the main door. A burning plank has barricaded our way. 

We say, We can’t open the windows. They are also locked from the outside.  

We remember there are only four windows in the flat –– some bedrooms have no windows.  

We run in different directions, coughing, screaming and squinting in the haze. The only way out is to jump through the loose bricks in the dining room, but the gap is too narrow for even Baby. Her doll can be saved though, tossed out to the shaft below, but on hearing this, Baby hugs her doll tighter. Auntie is quiet, watching the commotion with glassy eyes. 

We say, Auntie, we smell petrol.  

We say, Auntie, what should we do?  

We say, Auntie, will we burn alive? 

We say, Auntie, will we be saved? 

The fire soars and dances around us, scratching, embracing and finally engulfing us. Our skins dissolve like a chocolate bar softening in the sun. The flames sweep us into their arms and whistle into our ears. We huddle around Auntie as Baby and her doll bury themselves in her lap.  

We say, Auntie, is this the end?  

Auntie shakes her head. 

And here we are, all of us with Auntie and Baby and her doll, floating outside next to the park, watching our building lit up, crackling like fireworks. The sky above is quiet and grey, shimmering in the rising flames. Our neighbours scream around us.  

Someone says, Everyone is out except for the people living in that fourth floor flat. 

A woman says, Who all lives in that flat beside Mrs Gaonkar?  

Another woman says, It’s a girls’ boarding house. Some young girls live in it and a child of five or six. 

A man twists his mouth and says, That’s no boarding house. I’ve complained to the owner many times, but I’m sure these people have connections. He wouldn’t do a thing. 

A woman snaps at him. Stop it. Everyone is out except for them. Are they deep in sleep or what?  

Someone says, We received a knock on our front door which woke us up, and we ran out. 

All the neighbours nod that they received the timely knocks. Thanks to the good stranger who knocked on their doors, raising the alarm of an impending fire. 

Mrs Braganza is shivering. Someone puts a shawl around her and says, You can hold me.  

She shakes her head. I’m fine. I don’t need support. 

We see Mrs Braganza’s son walking up to her. His striped tie, the one he wore when he jumped from the roof, flutters in the wind as he slips his fingers into hers and rests his head on her shoulder.  

Soon, the din dies in the blaring sirens. The neighbours shout, Finally, the fire brigade is here.  

The top floors collapse. 

A woman shakes her head. Too late. Too late for poor Mrs Gaonkar and her girls, I suppose. 

And here we are, on an overcast evening, inside a thatched hut. We watch Dada as she lies on a mat on the concrete floor. A younger Ria is holding Dada’s wrinkled hand. Dada presses a pair of gold hoops into her palm and whispers to hide them. These are for her wedding. After Dada closes her eyes and the women arrive to cry, Ria runs to the peepal tree by the river, next to the dais, and begins to dig in the mud with her hands. She keeps digging until the bottom of the hole is too dark for any light to enter. She drops the earrings in it and covers the hole.  

As Dada’s body, tied to a wooden bier, is carried by four men to the cremation ground, Ria’s stepmother calls her inside the hut and asks her for the gold earrings. Ria shakes her head. The stepmother slaps her. Ria shakes her head again.  

Outside, the men holding the bier on their shoulders chant, Rama nama satya hai –– the name of Lord Rama is truth.   

The stepmother’s brother enters the hut and whispers something in his sister’s ears. They scan Ria from top to bottom, look at each other, nod and wink.  

And here we are, inside the hole beneath the peepal tree and the river from where irises have shot up, bright gold-yellow flowers facing the sun above. The earrings shine from the earth’s womb, so deep and secure that no squirrel or mole can reach them. The earthworms curl up in their rings and dream.  

And here we are, on a cloudless and calm night, watching little Diti sitting in her father’s lap on the terrace of their house and counting stars on his fingers. She lifts his face with her hands and says, Papa, there are more stars in the sky than fingers on your hands. How do I count the stars?  

Papa smiles and kisses her forehead. He says, You can use my palms to count. They are big enough to hold the universe in them. When I open my fists, the stars shine.  

Diti closes his fists and says, Papa, keep the stars safe. Don’t let them slip out. 

And here we are, in a dark room where Papa has grown into a haggard old man with a rough beard. He sleeps on a rocking chair, clutching Diti’s frilly frock with printed butterflies. Diti’s toys lie scattered in the musty room. A corkboard on the wall is teeming with a police report, missing girl advertisements and notes with fading ink.  

From the floor, a windup monkey with cymbals begins to play. 

Papa jumps up and calls out in the dark, Is someone there?  

The monkey replies with a clang. Papa falls to the ground and weeps. You are back.  

Another clang. He says, I knew you would. One day, you would.  

The monkey keeps clanging in the darkness.  

And here we are, on a summer afternoon, watching Mrs Braganza’s son sprinting to the roof, climbing two stairs at a time, his head throbbing with the words of his beloved: But I have never loved you. But you got it all wrong.  

Everything that has gone wrong in his 25 years flashes before him. He realises he has been living in the dark like a spineless mosquito that can be crushed at any time with a clap. And life loves to clap. 

Downstairs in her kitchen, Mrs Braganza hums while making shrikhand, her son’s favourite dessert. She calls out for him to taste it. She can’t tell if the yogurt is creamy or the shrikhand is sweet enough. Should she add more saffron and nuts? Or is it perfect the way it is?  

He doesn’t hear his name repeated over and over. As he stands on the parapet, all the sounds and sights are sucked into a deadening silence. From that deep silence arises a murmur –– Sorry, Mamma.  

And here we are, back in our fourth floor flat in the building that used to be a tobacco factory on the outskirts of New Delhi. In the living room, we gather around Auntie lying on the sofa. Baby is playing on the tiles with her doll. We hear a thud. Perhaps another brick has fallen from the dining room wall into the shaft. Perhaps another lizard has been crushed.  

One of us –– whose turn it is to make chai this time –– gets up from the floor to go to the kitchen. Auntie says, as always, Just a little for me. 

Three pots are put on the stove. One has less milk and more tea powder and will be brewed for a long time; the other is deluged with milk; the third is without milk and ginger and is utterly black. It is smooth and silky, reflective like a black mirror. And when we look inside it, into the seething black chai, we see our faces rising from it. 

2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist