Kolam Drying, Half-Wall Away

The rooftop to her left is empty. The one directly opposite is not.

She has known this since she climbed the last stair, since she pushed through the rusted door into the winter-morning sun. Someone is hanging laundry over there — a woman, unhurried, back turned for now — and the half-wall between their terraces is low enough that standing upright puts Meera fully in view. She has known all of this. She came up anyway. The knowing is the reason she came.

Below, the kolam her mother laid at dawn is still drying in the courtyard — white rice flour and colour, the lines precise, the geometry of the new year settling into the stone. The street sounds rise without effort: a kolattam drum from two lanes over, the bright clatter of someone's pressure cooker, a child calling a name she doesn't catch. Pongal morning, and the whole neighbourhood is awake and busy and not looking up.

Except possibly the woman opposite.

Meera stands near the parapet and lets the sun press against the front of her kameez. The cotton is old and thin — her mother's, actually, borrowed for the morning without explanation — and the winter light in Chennai at this hour is not cold, not exactly, but it has an edge to it, a temperature that sits just below comfortable. Against that, the fabric across her chest and stomach holds a specific warmth that is entirely her own. She is aware of it in a way she wasn't three minutes ago.

The bullet is in her right hand. Her left hand rests flat against the parapet wall, and the stone is gritty and sun-warmed under her palm, rough in a way that keeps her present. She has not turned the bullet on yet. She is standing in the moment before that, which has its own texture — the weight of it in her closed fist, the faint hum of possibility, the woman across the way who has not turned around.

Her breath goes out longer than it came in.

She had not planned to exhale like that. It arrived on its own, a quiet event that the street noise swallowed completely. The back of her neck prickled with it — a small tightening, the body registering something before the mind has caught up.

The woman opposite picks up her basket and moves toward the far end of the terrace. Still not looking. Still with her back turned.

Meera brings her right hand to rest against the front of the salwar, just below the knot of the drawstring, and the cotton between her hand and her skin is so worn it barely registers as a layer at all. She does not press. Not yet. She lets the weight of her hand sit there — the slight warmth it adds, the awareness of the shape of her own body under that thin cloth.

The bullet is still off.

The woman opposite sets down her basket. Straightens. Begins to turn.

Meera's thumb finds the switch.