Part 8 of 9 · 2 minOverkill

It went on for eleven months.

I could tell you it escalated. It did not, and that is the whole horror of it — it never escalated, it only continued. There was no night I stood in that kitchen and thought, now I will go further. There was only the next evening, and the next, and the small refinements a person makes when they have done a thing four hundred times.

She got thinner in a way that took months to be visible. I saw her twice more in that year, both times from the road, both times with washing on the line. Two saris and a shirt. The shirt never moved position on the line and I understood, eventually, that it was not being washed. It was being hung.

I did not stop.

There were seven or eight evenings across that year when I did not put anything in the box. I remember them better than the others. Each time I told myself it was mercy and each time I knew it was rhythm — that a thing done every single day becomes a thing that is happening to you rather than a thing you are doing, and I did not want that. I wanted it to stay mine. So I skipped a day, the way you rest a muscle, and the skipping was the most deliberate part of all of it.

That is the sentence I would put on the file if there were a file.

*He rested it so it would keep being a choice.*

In February the box stopped coming back.

Three days. On the fourth I drove to the north side of the city and the gate was open and the washing was gone and the heap of ash in the corner had been spread flat, and a man I did not know was carrying a cot out of the front room.

He said the lady had gone to her brother's. He said she had been unwell a long time. He said it the way you say a thing that has stopped being interesting.

I asked when.

He said, some weeks.

I drove home and I stood in my kitchen with the bag from the market still in my hand, and I did the only thing I knew how to do by then.

I cooked.

I made pappu, thin, no coriander stalks, and I packed it into the box at eleven at night for a woman who was not going to eat it.

And in the morning I took it to work.