The sun in Anantapur district has always been unforgiving, but this year, its wrath feels particularly pointed. It stays directly overhead through most of the day, as if trying to shoo the many diggers away by forcing them to smell their own sweat. But the diggers have smelt their sweat plenty before, and the salty stench has even begun to bring comfort. A heatstroke is simply not reason enough to abandon their pursuit of the diamonds. Two weeks ago, a postman found a small diamond—hardly a carat in weight—when he sat down for his lunch break on a barren piece of land. The diamond was put up for sale in an auction, reportedly fetching five lakh rupees. The news attracted men and women from every trade, who squatted in his place the week after. If a postman could find a diamond, who is to say a priest or a cowherd can’t?
But diamonds are rare, and finding one doesn’t ever guarantee another. It only took a week for the cloud of pessimism to set in, the number of diggers diminishing rapidly. When a second diamond was found near the root of a banyan tree, however, the fervor stirred once again. If a teacher could find it, wouldn’t the mason be next? Wouldn’t the veterinarian have his chance? The diggers stay on, charmed by the arbitrary nature of this hunt, seduced by the chance for treasure. They persist through prolonged bouts of dehydration even as sweat pours out of them, their skin acting as nothing more than a leaky faucet.
Unlike the other diggers, Nanda, is used to the saline smell that is markedly different. In what feels like a former life, Nanda had been a coastal boy. For generations, his ancestors had lived and fished in Chepaluppada, a village that carries fish in its name. Nanda grew up in the lap of the sea, and there was a saltiness that he carried with him everywhere he went. All his friends caught fish, sold fish, ate fish. When Cyclone Urmi hit his coastal town a fortnight ago, the community collectively dove to save their padavalu. For how does a fishing community greet the sea without their beloved boats? The cyclone descended on the village on a Thursday afternoon, and before most of the boats could be rescued, they were taken away, flung far into the sea. The villagers chased their boats, crying for them to return. To hear their pleas and return their livelihoods. A dozen men and women went missing that evening, and their boats never returned to the coast. Nanda’s padava was one of the first to be swept away. While his wife chased after it, he had hung back, standing under an upturned umbrella, watching both of them get smaller as they went farther into the stormy waters. In the moments it took from him to drop the umbrella and run after them, the water had swallowed both his wife and his boat.
When the waters of Urmi withdrew, empty funeral pyres were lit for the missing bodies. People left the village in large numbers, moving to nearby cities and reinventing themselves as taxi drivers and daily wage workers. Nanda had nothing left in Chepaluppada—no wife, no friends, no family, no boat. Even before his tears had fully dried, he sold his fishing nets, packed his one blue duffel bag, and caught the first bus that took him inward, into the land, away from the sea. On the bus, he met the ghost of his wife and burst into tears once again. She wore a deep green saree—his favorite—and a string of jasmines in her hair. She smiled, gesturing for him to sit beside her. Everyone on the bus stared at him as he bawled for two long hours after that. When he continued to cry into the third, the bus conductor walked over to him and said he’d have to throw him out at the next stop if he couldn't lower the volume of his wails. Nanda blew his nose and nodded. The conductor surveyed him, his eyebrows furrowed. Nanda tried to stop fidgeting but his leg began to bounce, out of his control. “Are you running away?” the conductor asked.
“Yes . . . I guess.”
The conductor leaned in. “Theft? Murder?”
“No,” he said.
“Yes,” his wife said.
Nanda stifled the sob that threatened to break out.
“Running away from what then?” the conductor asked, rubbing the back of his neck.
“I don’t know.”
The bus conductor looked disappointed, then returned to his seat in the front of the bus and didn't turn to look at Nanda again.
His wife giggled. “What are you running from? Me?”
“No.”
“Then?”
Nanda took a deep breath. “Just . . . everything. The water.”
“Where are you going? A desert?”
“Yes.”
Radha made a face. “This bus is taking us to a desert?”
“Basically. Anantapur jilha.”
“Is that the only district you could think of? What will you do there?”
Nanda only had a vague plan, one formed solely by the headline of an article that had caught his eye in the days following the storm and the funeral. Rain brings diamonds to the surface at Vajrakarur. The article spoke at length about farmers, plumbers, and shopkeepers finding diamonds worth enough to change the trajectory of someone’s life. Nanda needed a new trajectory and he believed in the power of names. With the newspaper safely folded in his one blue duffel bag, he had boarded the bus to Vajrakarur, the land named for diamonds.
“You want a diamond now?” Radha asked.
“Better than fish,” Nanda said.
“Who will you give the diamond to? Your new wife?”
“Radha!”
“What? Why not? Will you stay a widower forever?”
“I’m going to sell the diamonds.”
“Diamonds? Plural? How many do you think you’ll find, Nanda Kishore?”
Nanda crossed his arms defiantly. “As many as I can.”
Radha smirked and pretended to fall asleep next to him.
There are no diamonds in Vajrakarur. The land has been mined dry by those who have arrived before Nanda. He now walks across the barren fields, which have more people than crops, and chooses a spot that is empty . . . relatively. Around him, people stand like grazing cattle, walking slowly, studying the land below them. When he doesn’t look too closely, it looks like they are rooted in their places, waiting for diamonds to magically emerge from under their feet. The sea had always given him fish, for there were plenty. But the land doesn’t open up to him the way the water does. There are plenty of rocks, only nothing of value. Radha clicks her tongue.
“What are you waiting for, young man? Start digging.”
“I don’t know how to.”
Radha motions for him to go forward. “Use your hands.”
A mild sense of panic settles in Nanda’s throat. “What am I doing here, Radha?”
“Hunting for diamonds, no?”
“What was I thinking?”
“I don’t know, but you brought us all the way here. So get to work.”
Nanda looks around to see what the others are doing. Are they digging with their hands? Do they have tools? How deep do they dig? He notices a man watching him from a distant spot in the fields. When their eyes meet, the man stands up, dusts the mud off his pants, and walks over to the fisherman and his ghost-wife. He follows Nanda’s unsteady gaze.
“First time here?” he asks, not unkindly.
Nanda nods.
“Where are you from?”
“Chepaluppadu. Near Vishakapatnam.”
The man looks him up and down, as if considering him again. “That’s far,” is all he says.
Nanda shrugs. “Where are you from?”
“Not too far. Nellore.”
“And I’m guessing this isn't your first time here?”
“Not at all! I come here every year—though the rains haven’t been this glorious in a long time.”
Nanda hardly thinks the rain that took his wife can be called glorious. Radha doesn’t either. She sticks her tongue out at him and Nanda struggles to keep a straight face. When the silence returns, Nanda asks, “Have you ever . . . you know?”
“Found anything?”
“Yes.”
“Once . . . that’s what brings me back every year. If I could find something once, maybe it will happen again?”
“What did you find?”
The man breaks into a huge smile. His teeth glisten in the direct sun. “I got lucky. I found a diamond a couple of years ago. It wasn’t much,” he says, bringing his thumb and index finger close together, “Very small. But still… felt like a gift from the earth.”
“What do you do?”
“I have a tobacco farm a little outside Nellore.”
“And the tobacco doesn’t feel like a gift from the earth?”
The man laughs. “What is a beedi compared to a diamond?”
He bends down and picks up a stick. Sitting down next to Nanda, he sifts through the mud as if looking for weevils in grains of rice. Radha prods Nanda, “Do what he’s doing!”
Nanda tries to follow suit, picking up a short, blunt stick that he finds near his foot. But he moves a little farther away, sitting with his back to the tobacco farmer. He draws lines in the dry sand, and Radha makes herself comfortable between the two of them, stretching out. With her eyes closed, she says, “You couldn’t find anywhere else to go? This place makes the dead sweat.”
It’s a whole hour before any of them speak again. Nanda turns to the tobacco farmer, his face red from both the heat and a mild sense of embarrassment.
“What do they look like?”
The man turns around. “Diamonds? Like any other rock!”
Nanda runs a finger across his brow, wiping away the sweat. “How do I tell them apart?”
“They look like dirty pieces of glass.”
Radha points at the small heap of stones Nanda has accumulated. “Anything in there look like glass?”
Nanda picks up two jagged, crystalline pieces of rock. “Like this?” he asks the man.
The tobacco farmer takes them from his hand and brings them close to the bridge of his nose. He squints as he turns them over, and then brings them to his nose to smell them. He chuckles and hands them back to Nanda.
“Not diamonds?”
“Maybe quartz?” Radha prompts.
“Maybe quartz?” Nanda echoes.
“Elixir! So much more valuable than gemstones, boy,” the tobacco farmer says, still laughing.
Nanda brings the jagged pieces to his nose and sniffs. There is something pungent about the smell, both woody and musty. He turns to Radha, his face reddening once again.
“What is it?” she asks, hands on her hips.
“Broken whiskey bottle.”
“You know your liquor!” the tobacco farmer chimes approvingly.
Nanda lets the glass pieces drop to the ground, smiles sheepishly, and moves a little further away. Once the tobacco farmer is out of earshot, he drops to the ground, cradling his head between his knees. Radha sits down next to him and whispers, “Nanda! Ay!”
“What?”
“How did you know that was whiskey?”
Rents in the village are unusually high this season, and it costs a fortune to find shelter. Nanda resorts to sleeping in the bus stop on most nights while Radha hovers over him. This works well, until the police come one night and chase everyone out. After that, he seeks shelter on the steps of the Gangamma temple, taking on the role of an unlikely pilgrim.
“Is there a god in the afterlife?” he asks Radha one night.
She smiles at him, mischief in her eyes. “I’m not allowed to tell.”
“Not even me?”
“Especially you.”
For dinner, he eats the temple offering, freshly cooked pulihora in a small areca bowl. As he shovels the tangy rice into his mouth, he declares, “If there is a god, they live in this bowl!”
But it’s hard to sustain himself and his ghost wife on the steps of a crumbling temple. A number of miners from the bus stop join them in the temple, and the pulihora is also starting to become a limited resource. The priest gives them all a gentle nudge towards the hundi everytime they turn up to collect the prasadam. Some of them drop coins in, others simply pretend they don’t see it. And yet, the more hopeful of the lot stay on in the little diamond town, convinced there are more precious stones to find. Journalists and reporters flock to these miners with cameras, microphones and recording devices. TV9, TV5, ETV, NTV arrive first, and then come NDTV, CNN, Times Now. An easy story for a state—a country—obsessed with diamonds. National viewership numbers soar. The reporters interview the diggers, talk to diamond merchants in the surrounding towns, and create exclusive segments to feature past finds in the area. Diggers crawl to the fields like blank ants to sugar.
Nanda knows a lost cause when he sees one. The number of people roaming the fields has doubled since his arrival two weeks ago, and so far, there has only been one real find. Three days ago, a teacher who had traveled from Mysore found a brilliantly cut rock near the root of a banyan tree—one that did not carry the pungent smell of cheap liquor. She packed her things and left before too many people found out. Radha had commented wryly about how the education system would lose another teacher—and a smart one at that. The day after the find, the banyan tree was surrounded, as if the diamond was expected to have sprouted offspring for the others. But nothing else is found—not even quartz—and Nanda begins to tire of the humid nights on the temple steps. He can feel Radha’s restless energy seep into his own tired bones. Under the sweltering heat of the afternoon sun, he tells the tobacco farmer that he’s leaving, and the man looks up at him in surprise.
“Already?”
“I’ve been here two weeks. I could be doing other things . . . I need money.”
“The diamonds will bring you the money, boy. What you need is patience.”
Nanda shakes his head. “I don’t think I’m a patient person.”
“Did you catch fish in your nets as soon as you set out to sail?”
“No—but there are more fish in the sea than diamonds in this land. Besides, this place has too many people now, and it’s not like I’m going to find a Koh-i-noor here.
The tobacco farmer stares at him for a moment, as if only seeing him now for the first time. “Do you know where the Koh-i-noor was found?”
Nanda shakes his head. Everyday is a reminder that he knows nothing about diamonds. That he left the sea behind in fury and has landed himself in the pits of a land he knows almost nothing about.
“In Kolluru. Near the Krishna river . . . Diamonds are almost always found near rivers.”
“But there is no river here—”
“No river here now. The Penna river used to flow through here . . . that’s how all the diamonds reached this soil. But the river flooded, changed course, and moved south about a century ago. Have you been to Katrimala?”
Nanda shakes his head. “No.”
“You can see the river from there now. But unless it rains the way it did this year, it’s hard to see the water anymore . . .”
“There’s no escaping the water, Nanda,” Radha whispers in his ear, and he jumps.
He hisses, “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”
The tobacco farmer looks at him, confused.
“So many flies here,” Nanda says, swatting his hands in the fly-less air.
The man nods, distracted. “My grandfather used to tell me this story . . . my mother thinks he made it up, but it’s the story I remember most about the Koh-i-noor. If you really want to find something like the Koh-i-noor, you need to find a bigger river, boy.”
“Like Godavari?”
“Or Krishna,” the man winks.
“What are you doing with beedis? You should be dealing with diamonds.”
“Isn’t that what I’m doing here? I’m looking for diamonds, but you’re looking for something else, it seems.”
Nanda feels the defensiveness creep into his voice when he says, “I’m looking for diamonds, too.”
The man throws his hands up, as if accepting defeat. “If you say so, boy.” He turns away, his back bent once again over the small square of land that he’s been sifting through.
Nanda looks helplessly at Radha, who looks blankly back at him. He looks down at his own square, stick in hand, but there is a question in his mind that refuses to leave the company of the tobacco farmer. Nanda tries hard to swallow it, tries to bury it in the useless soil that he is digging up, but it persists. He turns back to the man and taps him on the shoulder. Behind him, he can hear Radha sigh loudly, but he asks the farmer anyway, “What’s the story your grandfather told you?”
* * *
A young man plows old land. The ancient land carries secrets far too large for his ears and arms, but it holds them in depth, where they sleep in the comfort of untouchability. The land and its secrets rest while Daksha upturns it. The plow tickles its skin, but gently, like a comb running through soft curls. Every time he changes the direction of the plow, the land suppresses a giggle, but Daksha hears it and joins in. The passing villagers watch from afar, chuckling amongst themselves. The land brings laughter.
Towards the end of June, when the plowing is complete and the laughter has softened, the seed meets the land. Peanut. Short and tough, a lot like Daksha himself. It is also a fairly new crop, one that the rest of the village still views with skepticism. And they voice it every time they see him: Why don’t you just stick with paddy? or Our rains are for rice, Daksha! or Why would you grow that Spanish seed in our soil? But Daksha is adamant and has grown quite fond of eating peanut podi.
This season, the rains are heavy and the crop sways uncomfortably. The evenly spaced furrows are underwater by the end of August. But the rain disappears as quickly as it appeared, leaving the freshly tilled soil in the hands of the livid monsoon. On the fourth day of September, Daksha sits on his knees, his palms turning to brown raisins in the muddy water, digging for life near the roots. He digs a trench and drains the water. It is slow to go, but the sun is directly overhead and for the first time in weeks,he doesn’t feel like the dampness of the air is wrapped around his throat. He breathes it in the breeze and lies down, his back to the ground. The land whispers, I’ve missed you, and Daksha turns over and kisses it.
Across the field, at the edge of the fencing, a young girl watches Daksha passionately make love to his field. She sniggers loudly, prompting him to look up.
“Ay Kala! What are you doing here? Po!”
“Stopped to watch your romance,” she retorts.
Daksha jumps to his feet and dusts the mud off his hands. “What’s your problem? Go home!”
“I will—in just a minute!” she shouts, squatting behind the trees that line the fencing.
He runs towards her. “No no no—what are you doing?!”
“Don’t look!”
“Don’t pee!”
“Too late.” She stands up, stretching, a smile spread wide on her small face. “This has got to be one of the greater pleasures of life!” she says, hands on her hips.
Daksha moves closer, groaning, “You couldn’t find any other field to pee in?”
Kala puckers her mouth. “You’re telling me you don’t want the fertilizer?”
He turns away and is walking back to the furrowed lines when Kala screams from behind him, “Ay Daksha! You can thank me when your crop turns to gold.”
Daksha grunts and picks up his sickle. In a sudden motion, he turns back and chases the girl, the sickle raised menacingly above his head. She runs homeward, taking her little chant with her, “Pee-nuts! Pee-nuts! Daksha grows pee-nuts!”
Once Kala is out of sight, he turns back to his waterlogged crop, unexpectedly breaking into a smile. He comes to a pause at the spot where Kala had generously fertilized his soil. The land near the trees is drier, and he finds himself tracing the thin stream of urine that cuts haphazardly through the soil. The length of the stream is impressive, even splitting into tributaries as it approaches the edge of the seeded furrows. She’s going to be thirsty on her way home, Daksha thinks. He picks up a short, fallen branch near his feet and digs until the stream disappears, all the while imagining the nutrients seeping deep into his land. At the end of the second tributary, which branches off to the left, he tries to plant the branch, as if to mark its place. But it doesn't lodge firmly. He fiddles with it for a while, trying to adjust the angle, but nothing happens. He throws the branch aside and kneels down, realizing a moment too late that he has now settled into the pit of Kala’s bladder. “Chee chee chee,” he mutters, and his mind formulates a little plan as his hands dig out the hard soil. Greet her with cow dung next time . . . the real fertilizer . . . wouldn’t that teach her a le— “Abba!”
He sees the trickle of blood before he feels the pain. The index finger on his right hand bears a deep gash and his deep red blood begins dripping into the little hole that he has unwittingly dug just now. He tears a piece of cloth from his lungi and wraps it around his finger, all the while wondering if blood can be fertilizer too.
Daksha picks up the branch and hits the ground hard. Something moves unexpectedly, the ground gives way, and the branch sinks all the way in. Bending down to take a closer look, he sees a jagged rock staring back at him. He picks it up, careful not to touch the sharp edge that cut him. It sits comfortably in his palm—a rock so ordinary, so unmistakably brilliant. It catches the hot afternoon sun, dispersing it in a thousand different directions, and Daksha’s head turns into a pool of absolute nonsense. I’m holding the sun! The sun! I can hold the sun! But—it doesn’t burn? Or maybe it does? He stumbles and lets the rock fall to the ground. He then watches it from afar, the way one would with a tiger cub or a particularly enchanting scorpion. He tears another piece from his lungi (which is now shorter than he would like, exposing the untanned skin above his knees) and uses it to pick up the rock. He wraps the folds of the cloth around it until it is no longer shining, and it is mostly madness that makes him think: I’ve dimmed the sun with my lungi!
Maybe because it was touched by Kala’s urine before it reached Daksha’s hands, the rock never truly feels like his. He misplaces it at least half a dozen times, and with each time, it takes him longer to find. The last time, it was eleven weeks before it showed up and somehow, it had been under his cot all the while. A layer of dust had formed around the rock and there was a rock-sized patch of clean floor when he picked it up. He could’ve sworn that he had looked under the cot everyday before and there had been nothing but dust.
Most nights now, Daksha has taken to holding the rock to moonlight and watching it glisten. Without sunlight, the rock feels less overwhelming. It doesn’t have the brightness of the sun, just the softness of the moon. He has begun calling it his chandrakantham. His moonstone. After he cuts himself three more times on the rock’s jagged edges, he fashions a chisel out of an ordinary, non-glistening rock and tries to smoothen its sharp edges. What he thought would be a relatively easy task proves to be a laborious feat, and weeks of devoted chiseling leads to a rock that is only the slightest bit smoother. It still cuts, like it is only ever meant to be a weapon.
The rock doesn’t just injure and play hide-and-seek. In small, significant ways, it also begins to upend Daksha’s life. The land that had yielded to him before now floods at the slightest hint of rain. And the rains—it’s like they have forgotten their cue. Clear skies magically lead to torrential downpours. The villagers don’t complain because their paddy fields are thriving and produce more baskets of rice than they’ve ever seen. When they pass Daksha on the streets, they make it a point to shake their heads and click their tongues. It is empty empathy, and Daksha does not care for it.
But he also cannot deny their tchs. The rain that brought the rock to the surface of Daksha’s land now threatens to drown him. After two years of flooded fields and lost crop, Daksha abandons his beloved peanut crop and switches back to paddy. The weather gods, however, are always one step ahead. The waters rise even higher, and this time, the Krishna river overflows. She flows passionately onto the shore, and it’s not long before it becomes hard to tell water from land. The village cries as a chorus, begging for mercy, for pity, and ultimately, even drought. We’ll grow those ungodly peanuts if that’s what it takes!
It isn’t until the rock is stolen that the rain recedes. The river retreats, but there is nothing apologetic about her. She moves like a coy woman walking backward, waiting for someone to call her back. When no one indulges her, she pouts and sinks back in. It takes a week to drain the flood water from the fields. Warily, the plows make their way back to the land.
The people of the village host a round of celebratory prayers in gratitude and a sack of rice from each farm is promised to the temple. Festivities mark forgiveness. In the midst of the celebration, the chandrakantham is briefly forgotten, and it is only a couple of days after the celebrations have quietened that Daksha realizes the rock is missing. He waits patiently for it to turn up once again, routinely looking under the cot, between his pile of lungis, and inside the clay water pot. A month goes by, then two. An entire harvest comes and goes, and a bumper crop of paddy falls into his hands. His chandrakantham remains elusive. He blames himself, he blames the village, he blames the gods. But only one man is really deserving of it.
“Who?” Nanda asks.
The tobacco farmer doesn’t answer. He simply looks into the distance, even though there is really nothing to look at. Only barren fields and their desperate diggers. Radha leans over and whispers in Nanda’s ear, “He’s being a bit theatrical, no?”
Nanda holds back a laugh and prods the man. “Sir? Saar? Saaar?”
“Hmm?” he says, as if he was not in the middle of a dramatic retelling mere moments ago.
“Who took the chandrakantham?”
The man smiles. “Who knows, really?”
“Well, you do. Your grandfather does.”
The man chuckles. “We know a version of it,” he says, now carefully examining Nanda’s face for signs of the curiosity he has built. He seems satisfied, so he jumps back into the monologue.
“It must have been a thief, though not a particularly smart one. The stolen rock goes from the hands of the thief to the royal gates. The thief cannot find it in him to love the chandrakantham the way Daksha did . . . in solitude. He loves it in the open, bragging about it in every village he travels through, showing off his stolen acquisition. News of an enchanting rock eventually reaches the King, who takes it from the thief in exchange for no punishment. But the rock has always been slippery.
“From the clutches of the Kakatiya kingdom, it moves through centuries, disguised as a spoil of war. From the Sultanates of Delhi, it passes onto the Mughals, who fix the rock on a peacock throne, and from them, to the Persians, where the jagged rock is christened a diamond. The Chandrakantham, a rock that reminded a boy of the moon, turns into the Koh-i-Noor, a mountain of light. But the Persians can’t hold onto it for very long either. When the king Nadir Shah dies, he leaves it to his son, who loses it to the Afghan empire, where it is worn in a bracelet. The bracelet is then given in exchange for hospitality, coming into the possession of Ranjit Singh, who wears it on his turban. But great diamonds bring great fear, and Ranjit Singh’s increasing paranoia about losing the Koh-i-Noor ensues in it being locked up in a fort. From Ranjit Singh’s sons, the diamond falls into the hands of Gulab Singh, and from there, into the lap of child emperor Duleep Singh. Five-year-old Duleep Singh might have eaten the Koh-i-Noor for a midday snack if it were up to him—but it isn’t up to him. He only has a title, and the power lies where the politics lurk. When Duleep Singh is eleven years old, the diamond is transferred one last time. It reaches the colonial crown, who take it all the way to England and plonk it in Queen Victoria’s pale, white palm. It is cut and re-cut, cast into a brooch and into a crown, hidden away and showed off.
“In its new home on the new continent, the Koh-i-noor earns the reputation of being a curse. Men have fought and died for centuries in their pursuit of this diamond. It is thereby logically bound to the female members of the royal family in England, and they rejoice in the ingenuity with which they have broken the oriental curse. They forget, or perhaps they have never known—how could they?—that the chandrakantham was buried deep in the land until Kala let her bladder loose. That it had always belonged to a woman—first to the earth mother, and then to Kala.”
On the bus ride to Kolluru early the next morning, Nanda counts the bills in his pocket and Radha watches, bored.
“Do we have enough?”
He folds the bills and puts that back into his slightly tattered wallet. “For a week, at most.”
“You can spend all of it on yourself. I’m low maintenance now.”
Nanda smiles, but it quickly turns back into a frown.
“What happened?” Radha asks, still watching him.
Nanda plays with the peeling bits of leather on his wallet. “I don’t care about the money, Radha. I would pay everything I have to share another evening with you. To touch your arm and hold your palm. To sip on tea and smell the fish.”
For the first time since she appeared, his ghost wife doesn't have a response. The silence settles uncomfortably on Nanda’s shoulders. Radha simply stares out the window, while he stares at the back of her head. Not a single strand of gray. The jet black hair remains oiled and tucked into a tight braid, and a string of jasmines is weaved intricately into it. The scent of the jasmines is strong, and he finds himself wondering if anyone else on the bus can smell it.
“Why won’t your flowers wilt, Radha?”
She turns away from the window to look at him. “That’s the question bugging you?”
“It’s just . . . I’ve never seen jasmines stay fresh for this long.”
Radha’s nostrils flare and the small, golden stud on her nose catches the sun. “Nanda, you idiot,” she hisses, “You're okay with your dead wife coming along on your little diamond hunt but it’s the fresh flowers that bother you?”
Nanda looks away, uncomfortable with the turn in conversation.
Radha sighs. “You really won’t ask me why I’m here?”
“I know why you’re here.”
“Oh? Why am I here?”
“Revenge.”
Radha crosses her arms. “For what?”
In a small voice, Nanda says, “I let you die.”
For a brief moment, she’s alive again, her eyes heavy with the floodwater that took her. “So why didn’t you come for me? Or the padava?”
Nanda looks down, as if expecting an answer to emerge from the lines on his palms.
“Hm?”
“I did come for you . . . I was just too late.”
“No. We both saw the rain, we were both out running. Why did you stop?”
“I don’t know, Radha. The water . . . it scared me.”
“You were in the water everyday, Nanda!”
“But I’ve never seen a storm like that. And neither have you,” he whispers.
“How does it matter?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. There was something vaguely threatening about that day. I felt seasick . . . can you imagine? After all these years . . . it felt like I was in a dream, and I kept pinching myself until my wrist began to swell up, but I didn’t feel any pain.”
“You think it was a dream?”
“I know it wasn’t. I’m reminded everyday that it wasn’t. But I’ve never seen the water look like that . . . I don't think anyone in Chepaluppada has, at least not in centuries—why do you think so many of us left? The sea was never meant to kill us like that. I half expected Manu to emerge from the flood—” His voice breaks and Radha waits. He takes a couple of deep, unsteady breaths before continuing in a smaller voice, “At the end of the horizon, Radha, I swear I saw the end of the world.”
She continues to stare at him, and when she realizes that he has nothing more to say, she turns away, and says softly, “Well, you were at least partially right . . . it was the end of the world. Only just for me.”
A woman gets on near Kurnool and sits next to Nanda, silencing him. The Nallamala hills come and go, throwing Nanda’s stomach into an uneasy lurch. At the fringe of the forest he runs to the front of the bus and begs the driver to stop. The driver mutters some choice curses under his breath but pulls up on the side of the road. “The panthers tend to roam this area,” he warns, but Nanda is too overcome with nausea to care. “So do the naxals,” the driver calls, as Nanda steps out. He stumbles into the overgrowth that lines the road and throws up, first heaving, then dry heaving. Sitting in the damp grass, he entwines his fingers, as if keeping them firm will steady the rest of his trembling body. Someone taps on his shoulder and he turns around, expecting to see Radha. Instead, he locks eyes with the bus conductor, who hands him a bottle of mineral water and tells him the bus will leave him here for the panthers and naxals to find if he doesn't come back in.
When he returns to his seat on the bus, the Kurnool woman is sleeping, but Radha is missing. He hesitates in the aisle—who does he ask about the woman only he can see? The bus moves forward before he can act and he stumbles forward. Regaining balance, he slips back into his seat, which is now suddenly too large without the lingering presence of his ghost wife. Nanda snaps his fingers to see if the woman beside him might wake up, and when she continues to snore softly, he whispers, “Radha? Radhamma? Are you here?” He receives his answer in the quiet that creeps in.
It is nearly midnight when they arrive at the Kolluru bus stop. Nanda stays in his seat, unwilling to get off. Can a ghost stay trapped in a bus? He doesn’t know the rules of the spectral. A loud, blaring horn signals movement and Nanda is forced to disembark. He roams the dimly lit bus stop, trying to find a good spot for sleep, all the while calling to his wife in subdued whispers. Radha, Radha, Radha. He soon learns that night that chanting may occasionally bring a god, but never a ghost.
For the first time since leaving Chepaluppada, Nanda dreams. And for the first time since Urmi, he doesn’t dream of the flood. His dreamscape is dry, arid, and he can feel his throat parched. Like a grape left to dry in the sun, his body curls inwards. He turns into a human raisin, and he’s always hated raisins. When he was younger, his mother would soak raisins overnight and make him drink the water in which they had been soaked. It was a strange habit—did she expect the raisin to turn back into a grape in the water? If he finds water in his dreams of drought, will he smoothen out, become un-wrinkled? Bounce back into a grape? It hurts to swallow his own spit, and in his hunt for water, the dream becomes lucid. His throat hurts so much that he is convinced this can’t be a dream. He wills himself to find a pot of water, a flowing stream, a perennial current, and it appears, cold, wild, gushing. Would a diamond sprout from under his feet if he tries hard enough? He stares with concentration at the cracked earth, but nothing appears. Nanda can’t picture a diamond. His subconscious knows only what he knows, and the best he can do is conjure a perfectly cut sphere of glass, like something that might have fallen straight out of a rich person’s earring. He wakes up with his fist clenched and empty.
Kolluru isn’t drought-struck like Vajrakarur. But it is more deserted. On his first day scouting the area, Nanda finds that the villages around are largely uninhabited, and the terrain isn’t as flat and easy as it was further south. He wanders as far as he can, stopping only when the forest threatens to swallow him. At nightfall, he finds himself back at the bus stand alone, having been abandoned by both his wife and her ghost.
It is a couple of uneventful days before he meets other hunters. That’s what they call themselves. Stone hunters. It makes Nanda feel more ill-equipped than ever. He begins to wander out with them every morning, a little after sunrise. They are a motley group. A newly-wed couple from Srisailam, a journalist on the hunt for a story, and an ex-naxal. Nanda would’ve never guessed he’d find a naxal before an actual diamond. The group turns up promptly at Nanda’s sleeping bench every morning. The couple brings with them a three-tiered steel tiffin dabba and the ex-naxal brings two bananas. He offers one to Nanda, and it is the most kindness he has received in months. The journalist is constantly probing, his hand resting on the dictaphone that sits in his jacket pocket, but Nanda finds him the least intimidating of the lot—mostly because he believes whole-heartedly that he has no story to provide the curious man. “I’m new here . . . I don’t even know what a diamond looks like,” he tells the journalist, who disappointedly shakes his head and moves forward with the rest of the group. The couple mostly talks to themselves and when on the second day, Nanda asks them why they're here, they tell him this is their honeymoon.
“You’re honeymooning here?” he asks, incredulous.
“What’s wrong with here?” the man asks.
“Why not Ooty? Goa?”
The woman cuts in, “Do they have diamonds?”
Nanda gestures around, “Does Kolluru have diamonds?”
“Why are you here then?” she retorts.
He has no answer, so he smiles and falls a step behind. The couple doesn’t look back; they simply trudge ahead. By mid-afternoon, the five of them are walking in a single file, with the ex-naxal leading in front and Nanda bringing in the back. He feels strangely exposed, so he wears the two handles on his duffel bag like a backpack to shield his back. Without thinking, he begins to say his wife’s name under his breath, desperately wishing she was here to cover his back. Maybe they could’ve had their honeymoon here too, on the fringes of the Nallamala forest. He and Radha never had a honeymoon. They were wed on a Wednesday afternoon and were back in the sea on Thursday morning. Radha hadn’t even complained—simply learnt his routine and made it her own. Yet another thing the water stole from them.
Every night, the group splits up because they have vastly different sleeping arrangements. The journalist stays in a motel in town, the couple sleeps in a distant aunt’s house, and the ex-naxal disappears without a word. Nanda has found comfort in the bus stand once again, but he sleeps very little. He watches the buses come and go, as if hoping to see Radha to emerge from one of them. As if the undead require a motor and wheels.
On the fifth day, the group finally approaches the bank of the Krishna river, where the perennially gushing water moves with a slow rhythm. Watching the water makes Nanda’s stomach do an uncomfortable little dance, and he wants nothing more than to not be here. He turns to the journalist and a question slips out. “Did the river flood last month?”
“Last month? Because of Urmi?”
Hearing the word aloud evokes a visceral response in Nanda, turning his vision blurry and his legs to jelly, but he spits out a word. “Yes.”
“Oh, yeah. You see that barrage there?” He points to a distant part of the river but all Nanda can see is more water, turning steadily more blurry with the water in his eyes.
He nods, anyway.
“The project submerged every village around it. This land has been a victim of drowning long before cyclones like Urmi.”
“But it’s so dry . . .”
“The river has ebbed and the monsoon is resting,” the ex-naxal says softly. It’s the first time he’s spoken all day.
“And we like it when she rests,” the journalist quips, “We get to find our diamonds.”
Despite the unusual solidarity that slowly builds among the group, Nanda is quick to start losing hope once again. They’ve begun spending close to ten hours a day sitting on the bank of the river, sifting through the damp soil. Even the journalist, who had initially declared that he was here only to find a story, has a layer of mud caked behind his fingernails. When Nanda asks if he is digging for his story in the ground, the journalist laughs and says simply, “This is a part of my process.”
But nothing has emerged from this process. Neither stories nor stones. It isn’t long before Nanda digs into his pocket and his fingers turn up empty, clutching at air. He opens all the tiny compartments of his fraying duffel bag, but there is nothing left. All his money gone and no diamonds to show for it. Where does he go from here? He cries for a little bit, of course. He sits with his back to the departing buses, wiping away the steady stream that flows down his cheeks. He knows he needs to return to Chepaluppada. He’s also known, for some time now, that he will find Radha there. But lately, he’s been a coward. Scared of water, scared of land, scared of the dead, scared of the living. The fisherman strayed from the water, and the land is sending him back.
He tells the journalist first. He wants the journalist to tell him it will be fine, that he will find a new way to live, that he has written and seen stories like this before, and they all turn out to be okay eventually. Instead, the journalist says, “I don’t blame you . . . there’s plenty of water, but there isn't much land left.”
The couple tells him he should stay longer. Maybe something will turn up.
He tells them he has no money left, and they say, “That’s too bad.”
Last, he approaches the ex-naxal and says, “I’m heading back home tomorrow.”
“Where’s home?”
How little they know of each other. “Not here.”
Nanda sleeps on the bench in the bus stand for one last night. When he wakes in the morning, sweaty from dreams of sand and soil, he momentarily forgets his hunt has ended. As he washes his face in the greasy public bathroom, he wonders if the others might have forgotten too. Maybe they’ll turn up and he’ll get to live with hope for another day. But their memory is remarkable, and the bus stand remains empty of any familiar stone hunters.
The bus to Visakhapatnam is scheduled to arrive around 8am and it pulls into Kolluru’s bus station at 8:17am. A seventeen minute delay is basically punctuality. Travelers begin to enter with their luggage, and baskets of produce are secured to the roof. The conductor hops off with a thermos in hand and walks over to the kiosk that stands next to Nanda’s sleeping bench. The conductor is handed two paper cups and the thermos is promptly filled with piping hot tea. He then heads back to the waiting bus, a little jump in his step, probably provoked by the mere idea of what awaits him in his thermos. It has been months since Nanda has had tea—he’s been drinking only water, and occasionally a glass of plain milk. And now, with the image of the thermos branded into his mind, there is a longing in his throat and he closes his eyes to imagine milky hot tea going through his body, cleaning the rusty insides of his pipes. The bus lets out a long, screeching honk, one that takes the tune of a popular song, and jerks forward. Nearly ten minutes after the bus has departed, Nanda detaches himself from his beloved bench and stands up. Shouldering his bag, he walks over to the kiosk and says, “Akka, one tea!” The longing in his throat makes its way to his tongue as the woman behind the counter hands him a steel cup with the frothy brown liquid, filled all the way to the brim.
Nanda has learned a great many things over the past few months. He has experienced a whole spectrum of emotions that he’s never had to confront before. But he’s also learned other things: Diamonds look like pieces of glass, but they’re a lot more elusive. Storms wreck. Rivers rest. People surprise you, but ghosts surprise you more. And most importantly: Things find their way to you just when you’re turning away from them.
The taste of tea brings back the smell of fish, and Nanda is overcome by the need to touch Radha, to feel her skin against his. He goes back to the river bank, though he’s not entirely sure why. Maybe he wants to talk to the journalist, maybe he wants to ask the couple more about their eccentric honeymoon, maybe he wants to ask the ex-naxal why he was a naxal—or why he isn’t. Or maybe —and Nanda doesn’t want to admit this, even to himself—he simply craves the touch of a human. But he finds that the only thing that moves by the bank is the river. No friends, no foes, no family. He almost turns away, but his throat has been cleansed by the tea and it feels unfair to let it sulk in silence. He sits at the bank and watches the water.
“Look at you gushing away . . . Not a care in the world,” he says to it.
The river pretends to not hear him.
“I’m sorry. I’m sure you care—just not for my wife. Or my village.”
Steady, unwavering flowing.
“Why won’t you apologize?”
The water pauses, offended. “I don’t think I need to.”
“But you could. You don’t even have to mean it! Just say it!”
The river moves again, slower. “Okay, I’m sorry.”
Nanda rubs his temples. “You know what? I was wrong. I need you to mean it.”
“Nevermind, then.” The river picks up pace again.
“So you feel no guilt?”
“It looks like you’re the one feeling guilty—maybe you should be the one to apologize. It’s not too hard. I just did it.”
“Apologize to you?”
“To your wife, you idiot.”
Nanda doesn’t answer. He simply dips his toes in the water, which is surprisingly warm.
The river nudges him. “You don’t think it’s your fault, do you?”
“I couldn’t have possibly saved her.”
“But you didn’t even try.”
“I didn’t.” He reaches out and lets his hand rest in the water.
“Come on, apologize! It’s easy. Here, watch me do it.”
The flowing water suddenly quickens again, as if late for a forgotten engagement. It hits Nanda with a sharp, biting force, slamming something solid against Nanda’s submerged palm. Instinctively, his fingers close around it and he brings it to the surface. If he wasn’t so distracted by the glistening stone he holds, he might have noticed the deep red gash that now runs through the length of his palm.
The discovery of the diamond doesn't change much for Nanda. At least not financially. Instead of taking a bus back to Chepaluppada, he takes a share-auto to the closest town and has the stone examined by Ram Seth, the proprietor of Ram Seth Diamonds (We sell only certified diamonds!). Ram Seth takes his time with the stone, cradling it and studying it in the dark. After nearly forty minutes of observation, he puts down his loupe.
“Where did you find this?” he asks.
“Doesn’t matter. How much is it worth?”
“Why won’t you tell me where you found this?”
“In the water. Happy? What’s the value? Will I get at least a lakh for this?”
“Oh, it’s worth a lot more than just a lakh. Think lakhs. But you won’t get the money.”
There is a ton of bureaucracy that lurks in the business of diamond mining that no one had ever bothered telling Nanda about—not the tobacco farmer, not the journalist, not the article in the crumpled newspaper that he still carries in his dying duffel bag. But Ram Seth does.
“Diamond trade involves police and governments, merchants and middlemen. The diamond will be put up for sale in an auction and the price will be determined as per the government guidelines.And then of course, there’s government royalties, taxes, and who knows what else. In the end, you’ll get next to nothing,” he declares.
“Not even a lakh?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Ram Seth picks up the stone again, turning it around in his hand. He then proposes to buy it so Nanda can avoid the red-tape. “I’m relieving you of a headache,” he assures Nanda. He offers forty thousand rupees for it. It’s a lot more than Nanda has in his pocket, but it isn’t nearly enough to make a life. Ram Seth walks out of the room and returns with a wad of cash. “All yours,” he says. Nanda takes the stone in his bandaged hand, as if consulting with it. Forty thousand rupees isn’t going to change the trajectory of Nanda’s life. He refuses the money, pocketing the stone instead.
Nanda takes the next bus out of Kolluru, just in case Ram Seth decides to report the find to the local police. The journey is uneventful—neither panthers nor ghosts appear. He holds the stone in his hand, and when darkness falls and the bus echoes with the snores of its passengers, he holds it up to the window. The stone catches a ray of moonlight, emitting a dull glow. “My very own chandrakantham,” he whispers, quickly putting it away lest it catch the eye of a thief and end up in a faraway continent.
Chepaluppada welcomes him with no fanfare. Everyone pretends he is simply returning from a long vacation, and when Nanda inquires about the others who left, he finds that no one acknowledges the departures. The shore bustles with routine, nets cast and boats anchored, like Urmi never happened at all. But it did happen, and Nanda’s empty home is a constant reminder of the damage she wrecked. He talks to the walls, but they respond infrequently, if ever. A week after moving back, he takes out a small loan and buys a new padava. He traces the smooth, untouched body of the new boat, but there is something off about it. It is too new. From the chest pocket of his shirt, he removes a glistening, sharp-edged stone and carves letters onto the side of the padava’s fresh wood. రాధ. He fixes the stone to the stern of the boat and sits with his back to it. The fresh scent of jasmine looms in the air as Nanda takes Radha back into the water.
* * *
Contributor Note
Abhigna Mooraka is a reader, writer, and educator from Bengaluru, currently living in New York City. Abhigna has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she was a Graduate Teaching Fellow & a finalist for the 2021 Henfield Prize. Her work is published and forthcoming in AAWW’s The Margins, Electric Literature, Catapult, The Rumpus, and The Adroit Journal, among others. She is a 2023 Kweli Emerging Writer Fellow.
