Chalk, Snakes, and Shadows

The street is already awake when Nilah steps out. Two children from the house three doors down are crouched near the road, arguing over the chalk. Nilah steps out, heads over, takes the chalk, and draws eight hopscotch squares. Slightly uneven, the numbers getting a little larger toward the end because she runs out of patience for precision. The game takes shape in front of her on the warm road.

They play for an hour. Maybe longer. Time moves differently on the street in the morning. The rules are renegotiated at least three times. One foot in the singles. Two in the doubles. That seventh square is too close to the pothole and is therefore retired from service. A new rule about what happens if the stone lands on the line is proposed, contested, and resolved through a vote that Nilah wins two to one.

The sun climbs as they play. She notices it first on the top of her head. Then on her arms. Then, gradually, in the air itself, which begins to lose its morning softness and take on the day's serious weight. The shadows that were long when she came out are shorter now. The dog by the compound wall has moved into a strip of shade.

By ten, the throws are more distracted. Someone goes inside for water and doesn't come back, someone else's mother calls from a window. The chalk is already blurring at the edges in the heat.

Nilah stands at the end of the course for a moment. Looks at the morning, what remains of it. Then turns and walks back to Paati's house.

The house takes her in with the relief of shade, the fan, the stillness, the smell of something recently cooked still in the air. She stands in the corridor for a moment, letting her eyes adjust, feeling the cool of the floor travel up through her sandals.

Paati is in the kitchen. The sounds of it arrive in small beats. A lid set on a vessel, a tap briefly opened and closed. Done for now. Tidying. Coming soon.

Nilah drifts toward the main room. Sits on the floor. Picks up her art book and sets it down again. Looks at the shelf. The old snakes and ladders tin sits on the second shelf, lid slightly dented, the illustration on the front worn to near-mystery. She has been aware of it since the first day without quite reaching for it.

She is still looking at it when Paati appears in the doorway, wiping her hands on the edge of her saree.

“You've been looking at that tin for ten minutes”, Paati says.

“I haven't”, Nilah says.

Paati lifts the tin from the shelf and settles herself down on the floor between them with the practiced ease of someone who has been sitting on floors her whole life and intends to continue. She opens the lid. Inside: the board, folded twice, its colours softened with age; the dice in a small cloth pouch; the pieces, flat and plastic, four colours.

They unfold the board between them. The snakes are large and vivid, drawn in the style of a different decade, with expressions that Nilah finds genuinely alarming. The ladders are narrow and optimistic. She takes green. Paati takes yellow, as if yellow has always been hers, which Nilah suspects it has.

The dice rattle. The pieces move.

Paati lands on a snake three times in the first round and says nothing each time. Not frustration, not resignation. Nothing. She picks up her piece, sets it back, and rolls again with exactly the same quality of attention as before.

“Doesn't it bother you?”, Nilah asks, after the third snake.

Paati considers this with the seriousness it apparently deserves.

“The snake is also part of the game”, she says finally.

At some point, without getting up, Paati reaches behind her and produces the murukku tin. It has been there all along, Nilah realises, placed within reach before the game even started. Paati sets it between the board and herself without a word.

Nilah takes a piece. The crunch is so loud in the quiet afternoon that she almost laughs. Salty, spiced and completely right. She takes another before she has finished the first.

They play two rounds and talk between throws the way they always do, sideways, without looking directly at each other, both of them looking at the board. Paati remembers that this same tin used to live in this same spot when Nilah's mother was small. That she used to reach for it mid-game without breaking eye contact with the board, which Nilah is doing right now, and which Paati does not point out.

The afternoon deepens and softens the way it does around the twilight. The light shifting from its midday authority into something more amber, more generous. Nilah feels the change before she sees it.

She goes to the window and looks out. A door opening. A child appearing on a step. The particular sense of something resuming.

She finds her sandals. Calls to Paati that she is going out. Paati, from somewhere in the back of the house, makes the sound that means fine, be back before dark, don't go past the corner. Nilah already knows all of this. She has known it for weeks. But she likes hearing it anyway.

By the time she reaches the street, hide and seek has already been decided. The boundaries established, the seeker chosen. She has thirty seconds to disappear.

She already knows where she is going. There is a gap between the outer wall of the second house and the water tank beside it, barely a body's width, dusty, invisible from the road unless you know to look. She found it in the first week and has kept it in reserve ever since.

The counting stops. Footsteps begin.

She listens to the seeker move through the street. The other children are found one by one. A shout, a laugh, the sound of someone running and not making it. The footsteps come close once, pause at the entrance to her gap, and move on.

She stands in the quiet of her small invisible place and feels the evening moving around her, the light going golden, a temple bell somewhere in the neighbourhood, someone cooking, the smell of it arriving in waves.

In the dark space of the nook, Nilah starts thinking about how the day has moved through itself so completely. The chalk cooling in her hand in the morning. The faded snakes with their alarming expressions. The crunch of murukku in the quiet afternoon, loud enough to make her almost laugh.

Three weeks in. She doesn't count how many are left. She lets the dark, distant sounds of the night take the question away.

The seeker is still somewhere in the street and she knows she might be found any moment now. But from where she stands, pressed against the cool of the wall in her small invisible place, she can see the hopscotch squares on the road. Nearly gone. Worn by the day's feet into chalk-ghosts, barely there.

Tomorrow someone will draw them again.

They always do.