Ethereal Echoes

The tomatoes caught my attention while I was searching for cold water in the fridge. Red. Soft. Slightly wrinkled. I picked one up absent mindedly and pressed it lightly between my fingers. The skin almost gave in. And suddenly, without warning, my tongue remembered a taste from years ago. A taste of hunger. A taste of home. When I was a child, Appa wanted to become a writer. Not the kind who sat at home with papers neatly stacked near a window. He wandered through paddy fields, village tea shops, temple grounds, and riversides. He even built a small hut near the fields because he believed silence helped words grow better. People said marriage would change him. It didn’t. Even after Appa married Amma, even after my sister and I were born, he remained a passing shadow in our lives. Sometimes his articles got printed in magazines. Sometimes rich men from the village paid him to write praises about them. On those rare evenings, he would come home with folded notes in his pocket, hand the ...