The Destined Path of Water Chapter 3: Chapter 3: The Other River

Read chapter 3 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Rika | Age 9 The festival sounds came through the walls whether I wanted them to or not. Drums first, always the drums, that low hollow beating that started before sunrise and did not stop until the last family had walked home from the river. Then voices. Laughter. The particular sound of a crowd that is happy about something together, all that happiness pressed into the same place at the same time, rising up and going nowhere. I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and listened to all of it. Neha Aunty and Prakash Uncle had gone out in the morning. They had not said where. They had not asked if I wanted to come. Neha Aunty had looked through me on her way to the door the way she always looked through me, like I was a smudge on a window she had already decided not to clean. Prakash Uncle had not looked at all. The door had closed and I had listened to their footsteps go down the stairs and then the gate and then nothing. That was how most days went. The bad days were different from the quiet days. The bad days had a particular kind of energy to them, something tight in the air from the moment I woke up, and by the time the first sharp word came I had already been waiting for it. Last week had been a bad week. Neha Aunty had found a mark on the kitchen floor that she said I had made and I had not made it but saying so only made things worse so I had stopped saying so. Prakash Uncle had told me I was ungrateful. He had used other words too. I had stood in the kitchen and looked at the mark on the floor and counted the lines in the tile until he was finished. Today was a quiet day, which was its own kind of hard. On quiet days there was nothing to do except exist in a house that did not want me in it and listen to the festival outside and think. I did not mean to think about them. I never meant to. It happened the way sleep happens, not a decision, just a slow falling into something you cannot stop. I was four when they died. I remembered things in pieces, the way you remember a dream after you have been awake for a few hours not the whole shape of it, just details. My mother's hands. The way they smelled, clean and warm, like she had just washed them. My father's voice when he was talking about something he loved, how it went faster without him noticing. The three of us at a festival, I did not know which one, but I remembered being on my father's shoulders and being very high up and very safe and the drums were loud and I was not afraid of them because he was there. I had not been to a festival since. Outside the drums were doing that thing they did in the afternoon, faster now, more of them, the sound of something building toward something. Families going to the river together. Children in good clothes. Fathers carrying daughters on their shoulders so they could see above the crowd. I pressed my back harder against the bed. When I was four I had thought that being with my parents was just how things were. The permanent condition of my life. It had not occurred to me that it was something that could be taken. Nobody tells you, when you are four and on your father's shoulders and the drums are loud and you are not afraid, that this is something you should be memorising. That you should be paying very close attention. That you should be pressing every detail of it into yourself as hard as you can because someday it will be all you have and it will not be enough. I had not paid attention. I had just been happy. Now I was nine and I was in a house that did not want me and outside everyone was going to the river together and somewhere, I did not know where, my parents were. I thought about that for a long time. Wherever people went after, they went there. And they were together there, I was certain of that, because they had been the kind of people who stayed together. They would be looking for me, maybe. Wondering where I was. Waiting the way I was waiting. The thought arrived quietly, the way the most important