Amrita Mahale’s new novel ‘Real Life’: Tara is missing. Mansi sets out to retrace her days

On my first night in Jora, when I opened my eyes, there were so many stars in the window that for a moment I thought it was a wall riddled with bullet holes. This was nothing new. I had grown used to waking up in a cold sweat, my heart hammering in my chest, fragments of some new violence still flickering before me. I dreamt of you very often in those weeks; I still do. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I began the work of disentangling my nightmare from the shock of my new surroundings.

Stars. Those holes in the wall were stars. And what I thought was gunfire was just the roar of the Mahamaya River. There was no head, no body. No trace of you, Tara. Not yet.

I let the river’s full-throated song put me back to sleep, but for the rest of the night, sleep came to me in ribbons. I napped through the day that followed, and the next and the next, with long tattered nights in between. Only five hundred and thirty-five kilometres from home, my body had decided it was jet-lagged.

It was my first time living alone in years. With no one to watch...

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