IN MISSAMARI’S CANTONMENT, the sun grew wistful and grazed windows like an overripe orange itching to be picked. In the evening, it melted away like a pale, hardboiled candy on windowpanes, willing me to brush my fingers against it before it was all gone.

Neither imperfections, nor change had any place within Missamari. At night, watchful fire-torches held up by invisible hands guarded it; in the morning, its fenced and barbed boundary walls shut out civilian gaucherie, unmet needs, disorder and chaos. Nothing could alter its rhythm or shatter its poise. Not wars. Not mosquitoes. Not lizards that went kit . . . kit . . . kit during hot summer nights. Not the domestic squabble that once erupted in an officer’s home and resulted in a kitchen fire which many believed was started by the wife herself to melt her anger in. Missamari did not flinch or mope when its men faced bullets during wars or when a young soldier died of tapeworm during peace. Grief, when it arrived, was cast aside because it came in the way of life. The cantonment took pride in its health. In its square-shouldered officers. In regularly pruned trees with trunks that were numbered and banded with white paint. In buildings unchipped by age and untouched by seasons.

Monsoon was dismissed with indulgent smiles even as rains pounded doors with angry fists, flooded hollows, pulped distant foothills and tore clouds in futile anger. Army wives piled up bravely in splashy jongas and headed towards tarpaulin-coated, shivering Sunday marts, where they picked up saree hems, ducked showers and bought black-seeded, cardamom bananas, rain-salted fish and the oozing joy of overripe pineapples. As the jeeps veered back to the cantonment, toothy tires rutted the mud, bamboo groves winked and hummed in the rain.

But no rain could seep into the crisp, happy, whitewashed cores of army homes where ovens grew warm, rain songs crackled out of radios and children snuggled under yellow, ribbed Assamese quilts. No one ever acknowledged snakes, because broom-wielding orderlies shooed away the foolish, limp things when they sneaked into toilet bowls or festooned curtain rods. And if one unthinkingly wound its way into the Army School, the tribal watchman scanning the compound bounded after it, humoured it for some time, let it thrash, arch, vault over puddles. And then pierced its fear-crazed length with a spear, held it up to amuse squealing children, put the limp garland around his neck and danced a jovial tandav like Shiva. At dusk, he roasted and ate his prey with toddy-thickened friends.

When the rain became just a beady fringe around the trees, the sun exploded in the sky, turning Missamari into a bright, crayon drawing. Children tumbled out of homes to reclaim their front-yards. I often saw Ma looking at them, with a sad, half-finished smile. As if they had something she had either lost or misplaced somewhere. I never saw her smile too much. Life for her was a puzzle halved into life and death, and she had never been able to decide which piece she wanted. I learnt from her to smell grief before it struck. To turn foreboding into a fine-tuned instrument. Just a day before the Big Fete, when the school sky was littered with balloons and silver stars, I announced, ‘It will all go waste, Ma. It will rain tomorrow.’

Monsoon was officially over, but it rained. And even though I had known it all beforehand, I could not bear to see the limp festoons. Or the gauzy triangles and furling red, paper snakes dying prematurely in mud. I knew, however, that they had to die. Because everything died. Beautiful things. Loved things. It was risky to love anything too much. And silly to take anything for granted. Even the Officers’ Mess, with its equanimity of luxury, good manners and fearless happiness, could not lull me into contentment.

‘Labalab hai kahin sagar, kahin khali piyale hain, ye kaisa daur hai saki, ye kya taksim hai saki?’ sang Papu one evening in the Mess, closed eyes trying to recall his favourite Kaifi Azmi nazm, when I interrupted a brood of gentlyrouged women daintily sipping their lime juice cordials. When they all turned to me, glossy mouths parted in indulgent smiles, I said, ‘Did you hear, a poor jawan recently died of a tapeworm? What does a tapeworm look like, aunty? Does it grow into a long snake and curl and uncurl inside someone before killing them?’

The sullen silence they answered me with grew thick and dark when, a week later, at a children’s party, I cornered the mother of the drooling birthday girl and asked, ‘Aunty, do you remember Mrs Vasanth, our neighbour who set herself on fire? Do you know that she then hid herself in her bathroom because she could not bear to be seen without her skin?’

The cantonment clammed up against me. And since I did not mispronounce words or lisp through a baby mouth, adults stopped pinching my cheeks or pulling my pigtails. Ma and Papu never told me that I was strange because I chewed the perfect white of NP chewing gum with an almost vengeful anger. Or because I never let beautiful things be and even bled my vegetable-dyed wooden blocks to a muddy ugliness in a water tub. They only scolded me when I padded into the orderly’s lime-washed room, opened his Champa hair oil bottle and emptied his Ponds talcum powder jar. They asked me, but I could not explain why I had enjoyed pouring the oil till its ruby-red, ribbony haze had joined the talcum powder mound on the floor, forming a viscous red and white puddle near my feet. That looking at that puddle made me think that, in life, wrong things always got mixed up and nothing was sealed against damage. Sometimes, without telling Ma and Papu, I went past the sacred cantonment grass and climbed over the barbed boundary walls to explore the other half of humanity in Missamari. Once I found a few smudged children digging the earth deep with their fingers to get to the fat toes of sweet potatoes. They befriended me after I gave them a small blade to help them along. They began to smile hesitantly at me and to wistfully run their dark, bright, hungry eyes over my flowered frock, my neat ponytail.

I wished they knew they had nothing to fear from me. I wished I could tell them that I was no different from them. That Missamari’s air pulsing with soft, mellow miracles was not mine. Nor Ma’s. I wished I could tell them that nothing was permanent for us. Happiness was something we would always leave behind and go somewhere else.