Somewhere beyond the barbed wire, a rooster crows—not the proud cuk-a-doo of dawn, but the choked gurgle of something caught mid-syllable.
Meena counts her hens as the sun bleeds over the dunes. She licks her thumb before flipping each pebble in her palm: nine, ten, eleven. The twelfth pebble sticks to her skin with sweat. She frowns. The coop's wire hums under her fingers, vibrating with the weight of absence.
"Bilquis?" she calls, kicking dust at the empty nesting box. The name tastes like a lie. Bilquis never wandered. Bilquis had one leg shorter than the other, hopped like a broken compass needle. Meena's toe nudges something in the dirt—a feather, barbed with dried blood.
The morning isn't bright. It's glaring. The kind of light that shows every crack in the mud-brick walls, every fray in the hem of Meena's kameez. She crouches, presses her palm to the ground. The earth thrums—not with the rhythm of hooves, but with the arrhythmic stutter of something burrowing. Or being dragged.
Behind her, the well gargles. Zamshed's reflection bobs in the water, his face stretched long and pale like dough. He's holding the pot wrong—not by the handle, but cradled against his chest like a child. The metal rings softly against his ribs. "You hear that?" he whispers.
Meena doesn't answer. She's watching her own shadow pool at her feet. It's too small. The hemline doesn't match her kameez.
The pot rings again.
This time, they both hear it.
Shumona's voice curls from the alleyway, sticky as date syrup, "Told you debts come due."
The rooster crows.
No—that's not a rooster.
That's Iqbal, screaming.
Meena's knees hit the dirt as her shadow peels itself from the ground and walks away.
Three huts apart—past the donkey cart with one broken wheel, past the blue plastic drum that hasn't held water since the drought—there's the Jagarry seller's home. Their walls are painted the color of overripe mangoes, sticky with generations of sugarcane juice splatter.
The Jagarrys don't buy sweet; they are sweet. Their sugarcanes grow twisted as old men's fingers, their date trees weep syrup onto the tin roofs.
Every child in Tamaam knows to lick the Jagarry walls at noon, taste caramel by sunset.
The city doctor's wife comes every Thursday, her sunglasses smudged with fingerprints she'll never wipe clean. "One kilo," she says, like it's a prescription, not pleasure. Her husband prefers his sugar sterile—white cubes in clinical paper wraps.
But she? She licks the Jagarry's wooden ladle clean when she thinks no one's looking. Today, her gold bangles catch the light as she reaches for her purse. The ladle's gone. So is her shadow.
Zamshed's pot rings a third time. Not the tinny chirp of a cellphone—this is the sound of a bell drowned in a well, now crawling back up the rope. Meena grabs his arm.
The doctor's wife drops her purse. Coins scatter like beetles. "Wh-where's my—?"
Shumona smiles. "Your shadow? Hah." She spits near the woman's designer sandals. "Petni's wearing it to the city now. Likes how it fits."
The pot tips over. Out spills not bones, but black syrup—thick, glistening. It pools around Zamshed's feet, rises in tendrils that smell of burnt sugar and rotting dates.
A shadow stands at the edge of the village, holding the Jagarry ladle. It turns, winks with eyes that are not eyes, and licks the syrup dripping from the wood.
The doctor's wife faints clean into the donkey cart.
Somewhere beyond the dunes, a phone stops ringing.
The taste of sugarcane turns to salt.
Shumona laughs.
Not the warm, knee-slapping kind. The sound of pebbles rattling in a tin can. The village holds its breath—not out of reverence, but the same way a goat freezes when the butcher's shadow crosses its path.
Baul-Eknath shuffles past the well, his patchwork robe flapping like wounded wings. He's singing—no, unraveling—a verse about fish bones and forgotten saints.
His voice isn't tuned to any scale known to man; it's the pitch of a rusted bicycle chain scraping concrete.
"Listen," whispers Meena, gripping Zamshed's wrist.
They all listen.
Baul-Eknath's song coils around like a vine strangling a bell. "The shadow eats the light, the light eats the name, the name eats the..." His bare foot kicks a pebble. It arcs over the barbed wire. The rooster—what's left of it—falls silent mid-gurgle.
Morning in Tamaam isn't a sunrise. It's a slow peeling back of bandages over old wounds. The clay stoves exhale smoke that smells like burnt knuckles.
The widow Begum sweeps her doorstep with a broom wrapped with her late husband's shirt sleeves. Every stroke raises dust that settles exactly where it was.
Meena's mother kneels by the communal grinding stone, her palms pressed to the cold granite like it's a holy book. The other women pretend not to see how her fingers tremble around the pestle. "The Jagarrys need twenty kilos of rice flour by noon," says old Mrs. Ghosh, dropping a sack with a thud that sounds like a body hitting water.
The grinding stone sings. Or maybe it's Meena's mother. The sound gets swallowed by the hiss of milk boiling over at the tea stall.
At the big huts—the ones with tin roofs that don't scream when the wind hits—the city doctor's wife wakes with her mouth full of salt. Her sunglasses lie twisted on the floor, one lens cracked like a spiderweb.
Shumona spits into the firepit where the village women make pithas. The dough sizzles. "Patience," she says, rolling a ball between her palms. It's unclear if she's talking to the dough or the doctor's wife.
"Like this," says Meena's aunt, slapping another woman's hands away. She demonstrates—flick, fold, press—the motion as precise as a bone setting.
The children run errands, bare feet kicking up dust that stings like static. Little Aafreen carries a tray of steaming bhapa pithas balanced on her head. The scent of jaggery and rice flour trails behind her like a bridal veil.
At the tube-well, Zamshed watches his reflection shiver in the bucket. The pot—Yusuf's pot—sits beside him, empty now. Or maybe full of something he can't see.
Baul-Eknath's song drifts back, "...and what's left after the eating?" He plucks a string on his ektara. It sounds like a bone snapping.
The village doesn't answer.
They're too busy counting shadows.
Shumona licks jaggery from her thumb. "Sweet," she says.
Then smiles.
"At first."
Somewhere beyond the dunes, a phone starts ringing again.
The grinding stone stops singing.
Meena's mother looks at her palms. They're bleeding.
The day brightens.
Nobody notices.
Not when the sun drags itself across the sky like a drunk beggar clutching stolen bread. Not when the shadows stretch thin as old women's patience.
The village of Tamaam breathes dust and exhales gossip, too busy counting missing hens and missing shadows to see the real theft happening at the edge of the date palms.
The masters come on foot.
First, the dust rises in the distance—not the gentle swirl of a stray goat's tail, but the thick, deliberate cloud of men who expect to be fed.
The wives don't speak.
They don't need to.
Fatima's knuckles whiten around the ladle handle; Meena's mother grinds rice flour faster, the stone shrieking like a trapped bird.
Shumona spits into the fire. "Busy," she mutters, though her hands stay limp in her lap.