Sharon Aruparayil
I have never known stillness.
Maa would tell you an entirely-too-long story about the night of my birth, shuddering as she narrated the way my wriggling, wet body shot out of her and landed on the floor with a wet thwack. We were alone, Maa and I, rain tick-tacking on the tin roof as the smells of the city swirled like old ghosts in a kitchen sink.
She said she found me later, pressed against the windowpane in the quiet hours before the city woke, my skin slick with the ghosts of amniotic waters, eyes wide and unblinking. Kolkata had already begun its breathing then, through the cracks in the shutters, the curling mist over the brick lanes, the low hum of trams and distant calls of street vendors, and somehow, it had settled into my bones as surely as blood.
I grew up with my hands in the dough, my fingers learning the curves of parathas before I could even read. The diner smelled of mustard oil and old wood, the iron grates under the counter cold against my palms, the steam from rapidly bubbling rice wrapping around my face like a second skin.Maamoved like smoke, soft and precise, her voice carrying over the clang of plates, calling out orders in a rhythm that seemed older than the city itself.
It was here I first learned that people carried pieces of themselves everywhere, tucked into pockets or pressed into folded napkins, left behind in the curl of smoke rising from a chai cup. I watched the regulars — the lawyer with the tremor in his hands, the widow clutching her purse like a heartbeat, the girl who came every week to eat a plate of plain rice and daal — and I saw the weight they carried.
Maa did not tell me back then that we were the only two people in the world who could see the bits of loss, slivers of longing, and fragments of words that people could not say out loud. But, even before I knew what I was doing, I learned how to move them.
Small gestures, invisible almost, but enough to shift the balance.
Orders came in through the menus, coded with dishes, and most nights I would watch people slide memories across tables the way they slid plates of steaming luchi and alur torkari. All of it was camouflage. Forgetting, remembering, erasing, all done in silence, no one watching closely enough to notice the smallest theft.
By the time I was fifteen, I had my own ledger. Not the credit system Shyam from the corner shop ran, not a tiffin service (Maa could not abide cold food). My ledger held memories, but only those people would not miss. I would brush my fingers across a plate as I passed, subtly catching a fleeting thought, a sigh, a hesitation. A patron’s nostalgia for a mother long gone. A merchant’s guilt for a mistake no one knew he’d made. I pressed them into my ledger the way one presses a pressed flower between pages of an old notebook, delicate and careful.
No one noticed. They believed the diner was ordinary, the trays of mishti ordinary. But every dish, every steaming plate, every curl of spice-laden steam was an invitation, and I was learning to collect, catalog, and store them before anyone realized a piece of themselves had already slipped away.
And like all ledgers, the entries had a way of coming due.
***
The client that night arrived like smoke curling through the doorway. She smelled of rain on concrete and something sweeter, like roshogolla left in a paper bag too long. She didn’t sit, didn’t speak. She handed me an envelope, folded so tight it threatened to cut her fingers.
I unfolded it carefully, as if the paper itself could tell me what she had lost.
Inside: a memory, preserved. Not hers, not fully, but borrowed. She wanted someone else’s grief removed, a scar she could never touch replaced by a blank I could provide. I put the packet down. My hands smelled of garlic and iron and the faintest trace of cigarette smoke. I could taste the city in them, the wet, bitter tangle of streets.
I nodded slightly and watched the grief escape her in a plume of smoke.
***
I started breaking the rules when I first returned after disappearing. The world had expected me to be Atlas A, the man who could run businesses, move goods, and answer questions in whispered tones that made men nod and women blush. They didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t either, not at first. But the city has a way of teaching you things you cannot unlearn.
Some nights I felt the memories scraping at the back of my skull like tiny claws, demanding release. I began moving them, first little scraps, a smell here, a half-forgotten word there. Then larger fragments: regrets, deaths, first kisses, betrayals. The diner had been the perfect conduit. People’s lives were already layered with food and ritual; you never suspect the man who stirs your lentils of also stirring your mind. Orders still came through coded dishes but I decided their fate: kathi roll for anger, mishti doi for love lost, puchka for old dreams you didn’t know were still hungry.
That night, the woman’s eyes met mine. She did not blink. “I want him gone,” she said. Not him as a person, but him as the ghost that lingered in her apartment, on her pillow, in the smell of citrus on her sheets. And she wanted me to deliver what no one else could: final, irreversible erasure. I nodded. Hands steady. I had done this a thousand times. But this one was different.
The ledger in my head, the invisible columns where I kept the accounts of what I had taken and what I had left, shifted. It was the first time I sold a memory that was mine.
A kiss I had given in the engineering dorm, to a girl who believed in quiet things like loyalty and the monsoon. I had erased it, traded it for a favor in a dimly lit office, and since then, pieces of myself had spread across the city like oil in water. I could never call them back.
Her envelope was different. He — the memory — wasn’t someone else’s. It was mine.
I remembered the streets where I lost her, the yellow taxi that nearly crushed me when I ran without thinking, my mother’s voice thick with disappointment, the sizzle of aloo chops on the roadside. It was all there, folded into a small rectangle of paper. I had no right to sell it. I had no right to even touch it.
But I did.
I worked through the night, the city outside dripping in monsoon light and the smell of wet asphalt. I moved the memory carefully, like a newborn through a crowd, past strangers who would never know its shape. I listened to the hiss of the kadhai, the click of spoons on plates, and imagined each sound sealing a piece of me into someone else.
I remembered every fragment I had ever moved: the young man who had sold his first heartbreak to keep his father alive; the woman who gave me a scarf that smelled like winter and sea before I replaced her grief with the memory of her mother; the street kids whose scraps of shame became currency for others’ joy.
I thought I was doing good, even if I was erasing myself in the process.
***
The forgetting started on a Thursday morning, the kind of day when the monsoon has left the streets slick with rainwater, the air thick and trembling with the smell of wet asphalt and rotting leaves. The diner hummed with its usual chorus: spoons clinking against steel bowls, the hiss of steam from the pressure cooker, the muffled curses of the fryers as they spat mustard oil.
But something was different: a missing order.
I found a folded slip of paper where there shouldn’t have been one, a painful silence in the corner booth where an old man usually read his newspaper. The slip was my first clue.
The handwriting wasn’t unfamiliar — elegant, sharp, deliberate — but the signature was gone, erased, the ink smeared like a ghost trying to remember its name. It was a request. A very specific one. I knew, before I even read it properly, what it meant.
Someone had vanished, and the ledger had followed.
I slid behind the counter, tracing the page with my fingers, inhaling the faint smell of cardamom and graphite. Each entry I had ever made, every soul I had shifted, every grief I had unstitched and folded into another body, pulsed softly in my memory. It was like the city itself, the ledger humming with shor, breathing through the cracks in the walls. I could feel the pulse of every transaction, every soul shuffled.
I spent the morning serving customers I barely saw, my eyes tracing the patterns in the steam, the rhythm of the clanging dishes. Everything was the same, and nothing was. I could feel it in my bones: the ledger was bleeding. The last fragment of me had gone out into the city, and I could not tell where it had landed.
By the afternoon, the diner emptied, leaving only the smell of fried onions and wet wood, the damp cardamom curl from morning tea still hanging in the air. We would have a few minutes of rest before the dinner rush started. I went to the ledger, a simple notebook, black leather, its pages dense with tiny script, and began flipping through, counting the absences, the shifts, the gaps that hadn’t been there before.
One by one, I traced the entries back to the city itself: the narrow lanes near Shyambazaar, the dank alley behind the spice market, the cracked railings along the Hooghly. I slid out from the back door, the cold air pressing against my chest like a damp sheet. The bazaar smelled of wet brick and fried snacks, the air shimmering with the metallic tang of the rail tracks nearby.
A woman called out from a shop selling pickled mangoes, her voice rough with tiredness, “Bhai, kemon?” and I nodded without answering. I didn’t belong here, not really. I was here only because a piece of me was missing; I would come back for her pain.
***
The city curved around me as it nudged me towards the river, the smell of oil and river mud clinging to my clothes and squelching through my plastic chappals. Garbage bobbed around me like slow-moving memories, and as I sank deeper into the water, I saw him.
Not in person, not yet. His presence bled into the air around me, a small figure crouched among the floating refuse, still, almost invisible except for the way the sun caught the edges of his frizzy hair. I knew him by instinct. I did not know his face or his name, but I knew the rhythm of the space around him.
The ledger had already told me; the fragments allowed the city to guide me here. Maa had only given me one rule: never your own. I had broken it, and the city had noticed. The river swirled between my ankles and almost tipped me over. I burrowed my toes into the sand as the figure did not look up.
I had been sifting through memories for almost fifteen years now, I scattered Maa’sremains in this very water, and yet, it was in this exact moment that I realized that memory is a thing that can see you back. It knows the way your bones were built. It knows the corners of the mind that you have hidden from yourself. The boy vanished before I could reach him.
It was a shadow perhaps, a ripple in the water, leaving me with a mouth full of copper and a faint tremor of a life that no longer belonged to me.
***
I followed the riverbank for hours, abandoning my chappals in the muddy waters. It could have been minutes, though. I don’t think time has any purchase in this realm. The water smelled of iron, and the oily foam began to catch the early morning light in miniature rainbows that blurred my vision. My fingers itched to open the ledger, but I knew better. If I touched it now, if I walked all the way back to the diner, the city would remember every secret I had ever sold. It would know, perhaps in more detail than it does now, every fragment I had bartered.
The dinner perennially smelled like frying fish, but only I could taste the metallic tang that hung in the hair. I’d built this place into a retro-café after Maadied, a place for bodies, yes, but also for memory.I served fried fish and tall glasses of Limca for the living to forget. The grieving would be served golden brown luchis with cups of chai, trading the unbearable for something lighter. I felt pieces of myself dissolving into the river, mingling with the steam rising from the gutters.
I remembered college, first engineering, then law, and the disappointment in Maa’s eyes when I dropped out of both. I felt the sharp sting of Father’s letters left unread on my desk. Those fragments had left me long ago, but now they were here, scattered in the city I had always tried to master. I could taste the fear before I saw it. My own fragments had learned to call back. They whispered in the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. And then I saw him again: a boy crouched by the riverbank, surrounded by the detritus of a city that had forgotten him.
I approached slowly, listening to the rhythm of his breath, the soft slap of water against discarded plastics. My hands ached to touch him, to reclaim him, but I knew I could not.
This time around, the boy looked up.
For a heartbeat, our eyes met. And in that fragile instant, the years collapsed. I saw him—not the boy in the ledger, not the one I had shaped with my hands and stolen memories—but the boy I had once been, trembling with the raw, unclaimed weight of the world. Recognition passed between us like a shiver through the spine: he knew. Not just of me, but of everything I had tried to hide, everything I had taken, everything I had let slip away.
The knowledge was electric, cutting through the humid air like a shard of glass. I ran then, faster than I had in years, back to the diner. Steam curled from the kitchen as if mocking me. I opened the ledger. My handwriting stared back at me, looping and precise, the tally of transactions stretching like veins across the pages.
And for the first time, I saw my own name written among the debts, the losses, the fragments sold. It was not my handwriting, but it was familiar. The cartoonishly big scrawls wrapped around my fingers as the ledger hummed again, a staccato that curled into my ears when I realized I had somehow become both the merchant and the merchandise.
***
The city thrummed outside, indifferent to my panic. I had always been the silent observer, the man between worlds, but I forgot that the ledger had its own memory. It remembered me as much as I remembered the city.
The boy had vanished again.
But I knew where he would go. The ledger had taught me that. Memory has a pattern, even when the owners do not. And I followed it, slipping through alleys, across bridges, under rail tracks where the air smelled of rust and wet iron. Each fragment of me I traced brought a new smell, a new echo of a life I had abandoned. When I found him again, crouched on a bridge over a canal thick with plastic and oil, I did not speak. I only watched as the water reflected his face, small and alive.
I remembered the girl who had wanted to marry me years ago. Her laughter had folded into every corner of the apartment where I had hidden from the world, and she had offered me a kind of goodness I had never taken as mine. I had refused it, not because I did not care, but because I could not allow myself to be held. Love, I thought, was an obligation too heavy for a man whose hands carried the memories of strangers.
I had closed the door, and the echo of her heartache had followed me through every street of Kolkata, through every corner of the ledger. And yet, for the first time, I felt the ledger breathe on its own. It was not merely paper and ink; it was a body, a city, a living map of all the selves I had been and all the selves I had ceded.
The boy’s reflection shimmered in the water, and I realized he was not just a fragment of me; I was a fragment of him. He looked up one last time. A small, knowing smile brushed across his face. I turned back, leaving the boy to the water and the shadows, returning to the diner where the smell of mustard oil and cardamom promised a kind of absolution. I opened the ledger again.
Somewhere, a fragment of me laughed; somewhere else, it cried. Somewhere else still, it reciprocated the love given to him patiently by the girl who loved monsoons. And I sat, writing, tracing, remembering, letting the smells of the city press into my lungs, knowing that my body would hold the memory of us all, even as the ledger scattered it to the winds.
Sharon Aruparayil is a Dubai-based writer, researcher, and experimental psychologist. Her work moves between speculative fiction and intimate nonfiction, often returning to themes of grief, desire, and diasporic belonging. She is a First Chapter Fellow and was recently shortlisted for the 2025 Deodar Prize. Sharon is currently working on her first book. X/Instagram: @khud_ajnabi; Substack: https://substack.com/@sharonaruparayil
