"It is always the beginnings that are difficult.” Alleged Ritwika, stretching her arms, fingers entangled together, pushing the somnolence into realms beyond. She was leaning on a pillow propped up against one of the legs of her Nana’s favorite cane chair.

It was a crisp autumn day, sheathed in warm sunlight. The leaves, dry, brown, and lifeless lay fallen on the soil lending an air of barrenness to the enmeshed branches of the trees. When she had risen and gone for a walk around the garden with her Nana, she had felt those leaves crackling with her weight, breaking into sharp, tiny shards, scattering under her feet.

“Yes, that’s true. But if you visualize the ending, your beginning becomes much simpler.” He assured her whilst flipping through the pages of the English Daily. A faint smell of burning tobacco lingered in the air. He had probably been smoking earlier.

Theirs was a novel friendship. No, kinship. Shimmering and delicate, with a touch of the infinite about it. She had discovered him first in some foggy, black-and-white photographs, hastily abandoned within a cardboard box in the darkest corner of the garage. Subsequently, she had been told that he was lost to the spasmodic inexplicabilities of a forgotten past.

“Mom, look.” She had spluttered, her voice trembling excitedly at having bared an ancient, hidden treasure, “I found a picture of you standing next to a fat, old man.”

“That fat, old man is your Nana.” Her mother had clarified after studying it for a really long time, her eyes acquiring a reddish tinge, the muscles of her face tightening in stern determination, the honeydew color of her skin fading into a pale white.

“Where is he now?” Ritwika had queried timidly, overcome with curiosity, in the full knowledge of her mother’s recent impatience with her endless inquiries.

“Nobody knows. One day he went to the optician for changing the lens of his glasses. And he never came back. I was only 15 years old, then.” Her mother had uttered in a daze, her fists clenched, with the long manicured nails digging into her soft palms.

And Ritwika hadn’t gathered the nerve to probe this, until a few mornings before when she found a wrinkled, obese man with a shiny bald plate, an unlikely gray moustache under his thin nose, curled up uncomfortably on the couch of their living room. He was wearing a loose, starched pajama and a cotton tunic that did little to hide his potbelly, which wobbled as he inhaled and exhaled noisily. The effect was comic and Ritwika had laughed uproariously though she hadn’t recognized the familiarity immediately. She took quite some time to understand that he was the real, older version of the man in that photograph. That he was her Nana, and that he was still alive.

She didn’t know that it was in that laughter filled with joy and power that her Nana had found the reason to accept the acerbic jabs of his daughter’s obstinate silence.

Suddenly, a warm gust of wind filtering through her short, auburn tresses tickled the back of her neck, broke her reverie and brought her back.

“Okay Nana, but I am also unable to find a nice topic for the story.” She admitted tapping her pen indecisively on the thick, leather-bound diary he had bought for her.

“You can write something about the changing seasons. After all, they affect us in so many different ways.” Her Nana advised, sitting cross-legged, his gaze concentrated on the puddles of black letters, his socks-stuffed shoes squatting haughtily on the remaining patches of bronzed green.   

Ritwika thought of the first time they had talked. Struggling with her multiplications, she had cried aloud about the lack of people to help her. Startled, as he was gazing blankly into the plastered ceiling, he had set off in that direction. Peeping into her room inquisitively, he had observed countless books, pencils, and erasers strewn on the floor, with her troubled face lying feebly in the midst of it all, and he had smiled. And that was it.

“Nana, after I come back from school today, you will please teach me how to cycle. I want to be able to go to far-off places like the milkman.” She requested watching the milkman slowly cycling past the cobblestone pathway lined on either side with sun burnt bricks, through the thick, half-opened iron-gate into the street outside that seemed to stretch into the great cerulean depth of the skies.

She had often wondered what it would be like to just walk on ahead along these roads to their ultimate end where the earth met the heavens in an eternal embrace.

“How does it feel?

To be without a home,

Like a complete unknown,

How does it feel?

To be on your own,

With no directions home,

Like a complete unknown,

Like a rolling stone.”

These were the lines that would cause the void screaming inside her to fade into a gentle trance. She would feel reassured, somehow. And increasingly confident that if she were ever put in such a situation, she would be happy.  They were from a song her Nana often listened to. He had said the singer was a guy called Bob Dylan. “He is a genius.” She had commented.

The school bus honked edgily shattering the melody in her head into a thousand pieces. Quickly, she put the diary into her bulky bag and ran. “Bye, Nana.” She hollered and waved.

“Oh! Goodbye, Ritwika. I am leaving today. I can’t teach you to cycle. You have to learn it yourself. And remember, let no one stop you.” He shouted breathlessly, his pitch gaining volume as their distance amplified. It didn’t reach a crescendo. He realized she couldn’t hear him. His words struggling to stay afloat in the shrill cacophony of rattling engine and hissing tyres, drowned mid-stream.

“Ritwika, you and me, we are vagrants. It took a long time for me to understand who I am. It took a long time for me to understand why I was unhappy. That is why the decisions I made caused a lot of hurt. I can only pray that you find yourself before it’s too late. That is the only thing I have ever regretted really. Being late.” He thought and glanced at his daughter, Ritwika’s mother. 

Mrs. Kamini Sen, stood on the front porch, muted, veins ossified, as she watched him close the half-opened iron-gate and walk away. Once again.