A knot of grass, the culprit of Arjun’s fall. The young boy’s arms flail wildly, a rare occurrence. He lacks the recklessness of the unbridled play of the boys here, on the outskirts of a village whose wet, shallow fields he runs across for the first time. He finds no shelter, comfort, or security in balance that has only ever made itself available to him by way of sturdy floors and flatly paved paths. Here, in the wilds of the Indian river grass his father once called home, he is a forgotten child of gravity. As he tumbles, a hand grazes, then presses the groin of another boy. First, the wrist. Then the edge of the palm. Finally, the broad side of an un-calloused thumb. A finger left to its own, caught in a belt loop skirting thin corduroy pants, ragged and torn.

The other boy, a villager, narrow and dark-skinned, whose hair is a thick tangle of uncombed black, flinches. By virtue of two, maybe three years, the villager’s height exceeds Arjun’s. He recoils nevertheless, jumping as though Arjun’s hand were the spurring head of a snake, roaming the thicket for smaller prey. Staring, breathing heavily, the villager, who had run and played and laughed until just moments ago, sours. He is a reflexive boy. Quick and keen of mind and body, and temper too, to be sure.

The boy barks something to Arjun. The language unintelligible to the fallen, foreign child. Arjun does not recognize the word, but has, unbeknownst to him, heard its English counterpart before. Its history lays in odd depths Arjun would never know, in heaps of bundled sticks, once used to stoke fires.

The other village boys witness the scene. They point and laugh, howling, eyes dancing with glee. They had played a game Arjun could not understand, shouting in a language he had never been taught, even by his father. They had run aimlessly, breathlessly through the grasses that crouched beside the river, where their homes had been built upon and around generations ago. In a village that had not become a town yet. That while lush and green and beautiful, as Arjun’s father had described it to him, lacked playgrounds and town squares that stressed the foundational importance of pavement. The only roads were dirt here, the only buildings wood and grass, clay and straw. The only other shelters cloth awnings, held up by branches and sticks, cut from the banana trees that stood beyond the flatland. Where, when the river would flood, as it was prone to do during Monsoon season, no car could drive through. Where the men would climb through the hatches in their roofs and jump from them. And they would trudge and swim through the mud, caking themselves in it, as they made their way to the boats anchored beside the river. Where these dogged men would row back to their homes, dig their families out, pile them back into their boats—children first, then the women—and make for inland villages where they had cousins or distant friends or silent families willing to lend the occasional, if begrudging, hand.

Some of the boys have run, their laughter rising shortly, vanishing quickly into the heavy fog. But the thin boy with the black, tangled hair begins to hurl kicks into Arjun, stomping him further into the mud of the marshlands. He shouts until his throat begins to strip itself raw, rendering himself hoarse, painfully soft-spoken. A couple of other boys, older and taller and narrower even, join him. Barefooted, they bludgeon footprints onto his clothes, club bruises into his skin, shades lighter than the other boys.’

Arjun is the smallest of them. The least coordinated. He has never been athletic, nor mistaken for it. Here, he is the foreigner. Thrown to the unguarded habitat of his father’s homeland. “Go,” Rahul had told him. “Play outside. You’ve been in here this whole time, playing your Game Boy. There are other kids, I’m sure. Find some, play with them. Otherwise, it’ll be a long vacation. We won’t have batteries if your Game Boy dies,” he said, smiling.

Arjun’s fingernails are short and trimmed, hair smooth and shapeable, free of knots reminiscent of weeded grass, his skin unblemished. His passport American, newly stamped. His travel provided for. Shelter and food and water ensured. His home suburban, a branch of a clean metropolis, with a lawn and a porch and a room for him alone, with a television and a computer and video games. All those thousands of miles away, in a country beyond countries, across oceans these other boys would never see.

Arjun wails, his eyes shut tightly in terror, and swings a fist, unable to know whether it’s struck. But the kicks only grow harder, strategically placed as the boys grit their teeth. Blows to the groin, stomach, neck and head. Heaving. Chest pain now. Shortness of breath. Directionless and uncontrollable dribble. Another weak swing of a fist. It falls uselessly. Groaning. A closing throat, a narrow way for languageless voice.

Time is the passage of noise for him here, stretching endlessly in the restless slumber of heat. He whimpers something. It sounds like nothing. He waits without a choice for the boys to abandon him, un-dredged in the riverside grass. He regains breath slowly as the boys run back to their single-story homes on the riverbank. He can hear the yelling still, see their silhouettes darkening in the growing distance, shadows lengthening in the low glow of the Indian evening.

He waits for the voices to die, the blood-orange sky to descend, make way for night. He pushes himself up from deep ground, struggling, and limps to the sound of the river. He can find home if he finds the water, though it is not his home.

*

Lakshmi has taken to the dirt road, praying the rain does not come, that the river does not infiltrate, and from within, destroy the land. She breathes heavily in panic; all those thoughts she knows she shouldn’t think. She’s taken a torch from the house. They had forgotten to pack batteries before the flight. No flashlight now. A flame lit, she wanders the immediate vicinity, calling, yelling for Arjun. “He’ll be home soon,” Rahul had said. “Children play into the late hours here,” he reminded her, smiling. “Maybe he made friends. I told him he should.”

“But maybe he’s lost,” she’d retorted. “Are we going to just leave him out there?” She was shushed, made to calm by her husband. Always reminiscing about the village, the river flats, the boats, the greenest of green grass. Remembering it for what it was, never for what it wasn’t. Always smiling.

She sees an outline in the shadow of the river. Something approaching. Stocky, limping. Face coated in grime, his right side shown in the moonlight, reflecting off the black water. It’s Arjun, she realizes, and she runs at a full sprint, torch in hand, towards him. The fire whispers, where have you been. It crackles as she nears him, a creature roaring, and as she halts within paces of the boy the light from it glows, showing her son. His hair is matted, filthy. His nose broken. Blood streaming down over his lips, caking at his chin. The little, prepubescent hairs. Left eye blacker than brown. Swollen, like his lips. Unfathomably bruised.

“Pandu.” The baby name mothers use for rounder children. Fruit. She begins to lunge for him, and he holds out a hand to stop her, reminding his mother that she holds a flame. She stops. Her breathing hasn’t slowed, but it begins to. She reaches a free hand out, cups his face. Strokes it, and for a moment, thinks of molasses. Comes away with it sticky, the darkest red. “I fell,” he says.

They return to the house, the torch held out in Lakshmi’s right hand. Her other arm wrapped around Arjun’s waist. He leans on her, his right arm slung over her shoulders. He struggles to stand, let alone walk. He had crawled partially along the riverbank; ankle having given out more than once. But they are home now, Lakshmi thinks to herself. They are home.

*

Arjun lays in bed, in a room that is not a room, but a section of the hut pulled away by a drab blanket, masquerading as a curtain. His hair has been washed, smoothed over. He was not trusted to bathe himself. He lays there swollen and bruised, in the jaw, nose, and some odd ribs. He feels naked, despite being fully clothed. Ashamed by his body, ashamed that he needed his mother to take a sponge to parts of him only he ever sees.

But Lakshmi had not balked at the prospect of cleaning and massaging the tracks and prints of mud from her son. She had murmured nothings to herself repeatedly, in a decrescendo so long-winded, she wasn’t sure she had stopped at all. The words devolving into little more than breaths as she had guided him into the hut, to the area of tile beyond another curtain for bathing. She had washed and scrubbed her son, dried and clothed him, and guided him from the bathing area to behind the curtain where he now lay, nestled in a corner by a window.

The only parts of Arjun that have been spared damage are his fingers. So, as he gasps just to breathe through the unending ache in wheezes and rasps, like bursts of water sputtering through a cracked dam, he plays his Game Boy. He thinks he hears the faint drum of rain on the roof. He has never seen a Monsoon before.

In another corner of the hut, closer to the door, Lakshmi asks her husband with a statement thinly veiled as a question, “What kind of boys would do this?” To which Rahul, knowing the facade well, can give no answer.

“Are these the kinds of boys you grew up with—those boys from all your stories? How can you face our son?”

No answer. The father sweats silently. Lips pursed; hands folded together over a dry mouth. He begins to hear the drip as well. A glance upward, then back to his wife.

“Go,” Lakshmi says, glaring. “Look at your son in there.” She nods fiercely at a curtain. “Tell him something a father would say. Something he actually gives a shit to hear.”

Rahul gives her a last look and turns to leave the kitchen. He knows she faces tears. He appears at a blanket hung from a ceiling, pulls it aside slowly and says, “Arjun.”

He bites his lip. The boy’s eyes don’t waver, and Rahul wonders if they’re watering like his mother’s, or focused on the tiny screen of his Game Boy, or both. He waits a moment. Then, “Arjun, look at me. Pandu.”

The boy’s eyes dart to his father, then back. No movement of the head or neck. He is wrapped in sheets and blankets and shame. He has grown protective of his words.

Rahul swallows, and his hand glides from the curtain limply to his side. He breathes deeply. He knows Lakshmi listens from a corner where she feigns inconspicuousness, if only halfheartedly. So, he glances back in the direction of his wife, and he steps beyond the curtain and closes it, knowing without sight that Lakshmi’s eyes blaze. He crouches at the bed, his face level with Arjun’s, fixed upon the small screen, his lips trembling. The boy has always loved his games.

“What are you playing?” the father whispers.

Silence.

Rahul cranes his neck.

For the first time, it seems to Arjun, his father shows interest. But something inside him tells him that the child he is now is not the child he was when their flight had landed in Hyderabad. He knows for the first time that the interest is something more, or perhaps less, than interest alone. Purer, even if it may be something else, or perhaps, oppositely and incompletely, it is what it pretends to be: an apology.

The boy glances sideways at his father, tilts the Game Boy towards him. So that his father’s interest, which may be interest, guilt, regret, or another singularity or distinct amalgamation, may be rewarded all the same.

“It’s Pokemon,” Arjun says.

And Rahul asks, “Is this what you’re always playing?”

Arjun cannot nod. So, he imitates the tight-lipped smile of his father, who he has learned it from. And Rahul understands, watching as the boy presses the tiny black plastic buttons on the console. Seeing on the small screen a character that is another boy, resembling little more than a block, roaming from a field of grass into a cave where water and stone lay all around him in the game’s programmed ancientness.

Arjun plays with the Game Boy’s sound turned off. And in the quiet of the hut he once called home, Rahul hears the growing rain, his son’s breathing in, shallowly. Then out, pained, yet increasingly forgotten with every iteration. He grips the boy’s shoulder, strokes it with his thumb. The boy grimaces. A bruise the size of the very shoulder it covers. Another tight-lipped smile.

Lakshmi draws the curtain, sits beside Rahul on the bed. Streaks of faded black thinly strewn across her cheeks in place of tears. Gives her husband and son a small smile of her own as she thumbs the bedsheet, feels its softness. She thinks of home, somewhere beyond the flatland. The family together now. Father and son, and mother too.

The rain begins to fall harder, the ceiling and window by the bed absorbing the rattle of the water. The son and the father looking outside, to the trees and the grass starting to sway in the wind. Rahul strokes Arjun’s hair as they all watch.

“The storms come fast,” he says.

“Huh,” says the boy, quietly.

Everything grey above the river grass.