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Chapter Text

“When you and I are together you often ask me questions about many things and I try to answer them. I’m afraid I can only tell you very little in these letters of mine. But that little, I hope, will interest you and make you think of the world as a whole, and other people in it as our brothers and sisters.” 

- Jawaharlal Nehru, “Letters from a Father to a Daughter”

When Elrond and Elros were eight years old, Maglor Fëanorian told them about the walls of the West. Well, he didn't tell him but Elros had read it in a diary Maglor kept during his days as a student in London, because Elros was the kind of person who shamelessly read other people’s diaries. So that was where Elrond Peredhel read about the walls of the West. How the bitter water from their seas runs through all the rivers on earth, how high they can rise to keep out outsiders, how they flow from the heart of London and twirl out across the world like barbed wire, propelled by currents. The walls of Maglor’s house in Kozhikode, Elrond used to think, must have been too high on the cliffside for the sea to reach. As pockmarked as they were, they had always welcomed him and Elros with open arms and a kiss.

On most weeks, when Maedhros got home from another Party meeting or some revolutionary circle or the other (it goes without saying that none of Maedhros’ comrades knew that he and his brother had taken in not only two grey-eyed British children, but the grey-eyed British children of the sisterfucking chutiya Viceroy’s sisterfucking chutiya secretary), he would always bring them a bag of hot, roasted peanuts. A bag each! A bag each, because Maedhros just knew things like that, just knew that twins treasured every little thing they didn’t have to share. Even nothing-things like bags of peanuts. On those nights, when Maedhros put down a cushion and sat against the wall, spine to stone, Elrond would lean into his carefully-guarded, coiled-tight body and fall asleep to songs about the walls of the west. They had been very young. They had been young enough to call Maedhros ‘Baba’ and Maglor ‘Abbajaan’, and persist until it meant something. 

The house lives on a cliff by the seashore. The house that once would have been breathed in, had the sea yawned: these days, it is enveloped by the petrol-diesel-tar of the apathetic Sand Banks Road. Elrond could, had he wanted, walk to six phone shops, even though he only has one phone. He tries to be content with the knowledge that the bridge, Kunjiraman Vakeel Palam, still exists: that he has to cross it every day to get to the house. The house on the cliff. The one in which he and Elros and Maedhros and Maglor had lived and loved with no expectation of being loved back. Two violent freedom-fighters, and the left-behind spawn of the chutiya sisterfucking Viceroy’s chutiya sisterfucking secretary. The setup to a bad joke, and the bones of a little life, wrapped in the cloying, earthy red around the house. At some point, a slow, jagged cat had wandered in and never left. He was the thinnest, reddest cat the fourteen-year-old Elrond had ever seen, had half an ear missing, and was mean for the sake of being mean. He and Elros had taken half a year to name it.

Were you supposed to give an Indian cat an Indian name? It was Maglor who put his foot down in the end. He didn't think he could live with a cat called Ramachandran. That would simply be “too Orientalist, Elrond, even for you”. They named it Rusty, and Rusty it was to everyone except Maedhros, who called it nothing, because “a cat that runs away from the average rat deserves no name at all”. 

He left the cat when they left India. The first time, that is. When they were returned, when England sucked them back because Maedhros was a terrorist. That’s what they called Elrond’s Baba. Maedhros, whose homemade bomb took off the ring finger of a khaki-clad British police officer years ago. They were seventeen when they were returned. Too old to forget that they had an Abbajaan and a Baba, an Indian Abbajaan and a Baba, and young enough to hold each other and weep for the entire journey back. 

Elros didn't want to leave it on the street: someone would probably either turn it into a road pancake, or worse, might eat it. He didn't want it to become Kozhikode’s newest road splatter, so the twins grabbed it by the scruff of its neck (it was a strange cat, who liked being held like this) and carried it all the way further and further into the affluent neighbourhoods. Elrond still remembers how the furry neck felt warm under his cracked knuckles, his thumb resting under its chin to support its ugly little head. When they left it on the doorstep of a house that had an expensive looking pink child's bicycle leaning against the wall, it looked back at them as though it was saying their names. For a second, Elrond wanted to raise a hand and wave goodbye, or put a little note on his collar that would tell whoever found it that his name was Rusty, and that he was beloved: still, the anticipation of exile stopped him. The bloody cat never even answered to Rusty anyway. 

On the plane, however, clenching Elros’ hand and trying to stop crying, that first time, guilt bloated in his belly like a trapped balloon. Not over Rusty’s fate. The cat would live, twins or no twins, and someone else would come to love the now-fat, ugly cat, despite its abrasive personality. It would be fine even if nobody did. For every mouthful of spare food that did not exist, there was a mouse that did. No, he was crying because he would no longer get to call the cat Rusty. Elrond would never get to call it anything anymore. He wouldn’t even get to call it Ramachandran. 

“They weren’t your fathers,” Elwing had told the boys, strapping lads, three inches taller than her. She had looked very, very sad, and very, very young. They had been crawling when she last saw them, the day before the lathi charge and the crowd crush. “You loved them, boys, and I understand that. They raised you. But they are not your fathers, Elrond. That there, that picture on the mantelpiece — my Eärendil. That’s your dad.”

Elros had told her where to get off, and went out. He went out a lot in those days. Elrond had stared at the photo, willing himself to believe that the blonde, grey-eyed Eärendil, the sisterfucking chutiya Viceroy’s sisterfucking chutiya secretary was, in fact, his dead dad. He would look at Eärendil, and then at himself in the mirror — grey eyes, pale, bloodless cheeks. In his school uniform, Elrond did not look like a boy who had an Abbajaan and a Baba. Perhaps that was why Elros never wore his. 

Exeter hadn’t been by the sea. 

“It’s only thirty minutes away,” Elwing had told them, almost beseeched them. She had tried. Even Elros couldn’t deny she tried. “Boys, we can go every weekend, if you wish. Exmouth is only thirty minutes away.”

“You can shove Exmouth up your hole,” Elros had snarled at her, before bursting into tears right there in the middle of the High Street. Elrond had stood there, feeling bad for his mother, but also glaring at anyone who gave his brother an odd look, fiercely challenging them to admit that a six-foot-two seventeen year old sobbing on the street about being too far from the beach was an abnormal sight. 

There was no sea, but there had been General Redvers Buller, a monument in the city centre paying tribute to a man who once lived in INDIA, ASHANTI, SRI LANKA, CHINA, whose plinth declared HE SAVED NATAL. It reminded Elrond of an obituary for a 62-year old Reggie Dyer who passed away from a heart condition. Not in Devon, but near enough. The headline called Reggie THE MAN WHO SAVED INDIA, though much like General Buller’s plinth, there was not enough room to discuss who had been saved by whom, and from what. 

All Elrond and Elros knew, freshly replanted in Devon as they were, was this: fifteen years before his death, Reggie Dyer lived in Punjab. In Punjab where he lived, he once kettled thousands of civilians, including hundreds of women and children, into a walled compound dotted with wells. He blocked the exit and ordered his men to fire into the fleeing crowd. That was how Reggie Dyer saved India: through walls, into wells, through backs and into tops of heads. 

“I am sure our new friend, him on the horse, had played an equally valiant part in saving Natal,” Elros had spat at the teacher, six days into attending school. 

“It’s only curiosity, sir, not disrespect. We are certain he must have saved Natal. We only wish we knew the wells he filled and the holes he left,” Elrond had said pleasantly, after Elros was sent to the headteacher’s room. Five minutes later, he was sent out too, and Elros had split half a cigarette with him as a reward. 

Elrond and Elros soon learned that General Buller’s stripes were posthumously painted on. An admiring historian recounted how Redvers Buller "butchered the brutes all over the place", "like a tiger drunk with blood" — the brutes in question being fleeing, weaponless native men.

It seemed General Buller’s beloved militaristic quirk was simply a passionate and persistent commitment to brutality. By most accounts, he was not particularly impressive in military terms. As much as he delighted in the idea of bloodshed, he seemed to not be very good at the thing itself. For all the years Redvers Buller breathed down Elrond’s neck, this aspect of his existence confused him. He’d seen a hundred statues of imperial generals, those talented at roving and raiding, tradesmen and thieves, basking in billions, hallmarks of gluttony. But this one? The man just liked killing. He was loved, and he loved killing. It baffled Elrond to no end. 

It turned out his twin was less confused about the matter. Elrond found that out in a few months, when a call from the local police informed them that Elros Peredhel was being kept overnight in a holding cell before appearing at the magistrate’s court in the morning. He’d set the general on fire, and lit his cigarette on the flames. It was the day before Elrond’s Oxford interview.

“My god,” Maglor whispers, when the forty-three year old Elrond turns up. “My Elrond, at my door at last.”

Actually, no. It isn’t that easy. When Elrond first raps on the door, the boot-shaped doorknocker right next to a sign reading THE BEST EXOTIC IMLADRIS LIBRARY, a pair of twins answer: five or six years old judging by their eerie missing tooth, eerie because both children are missing the same tooth. Elrond feels a sudden surge of nausea rise within him, nostalgia swilling in him like seasickness. The boys are identical, grey-eyes and black hair, but darker than he and Elros had been. Memory, however, is not the most accurate of yardsticks so Elrond’s stomach behaves as it would have had the twins actually been perfect reincarnations of he and Elros. Could someone still alive re-incarnate? Well. Does Elrond really count as a living thing? 

He heaves slightly, but the nausea thankfully goes no further. Still, the twins seem to notice. 

“Achacha!” yells one — grandpa! “That white man you said! He’s here, he’s here! He’s really tall!” He runs inside to repeat the news twice as fast. 

“Wow,” says the other one, looking up at him. “Fingon-uncle said Englanders get sick fast from food. Are you like that? Did you puke yet? If you puke, can I come watch?”

Elrond blinks. Turns out the average six-year-old boy’s delight in the grotesqueries of the body is a universal phenomenon. 

“Absolutely,” he nods, giving him a thumbs-up. “You’ll be the guest of honour.”

“God-promise?” the twin glares at him suspiciously, before sticking out his hand to be shaken. “If you make a false god-promise, you die.”

“Elrond!” and Maglor stands in the doorway, eyes wide and leaking despite himself, the other twin trailing at his heels and desperate to not miss even a moment of the action. Elrond feels a lump rise in his throat but it tempers immediately, and he waits to speak until the old numbness paints itself expertly over his voice, just like how he practiced. 

“My god. My Elrond, at my door at last!” Maglor gasps, and then: “and you’ve kept your beautiful long hair!”

“Is this the white man you keep talking about?” the twin that had stayed at the door asks, wrinkling his nose as if Elrond were a particularly poor specimen of white man. “He said he’ll let me watch him puke, grandpa, he promised! Can you give him food poisoning, please please please?” 

Maglor wrinkles his own nose, and grabs the child lightly by his ear, moving him backwards so Elrond and his single suitcase can step inside. He turns to his grandson just so he has something to do, keeping up a constant stream of scolding as he shows Elrond into the living room (as if he hadn’t grown up being scolded all the way down the same corridor): “Elladan, for god’s sake, he’s not even stepped foot in the house before you — this is why people call the Library a madhouse — watch him puke, Allah mian, why have I never had the good fortune to look after a single normal child? Have you done your homework? I thought not — both of you, up!” 

“Elladan and…” Elrond grins at the other boy, pretending to forget his name. “El…”

“Elrohir, stupid!” cries Elrohir, expertly ignoring the glare Maglor launched his way for calling a guest stupid. “I’m the taller one, don’t forget that.”

“Elros’ boys,” Maglor sighs unnecessarily, choosing to ignore the boys now perching almost on top of Elrond’s suitcase, throwing it hopeful little glances in the way of children who had memorised a list of delicacies foreigners’ suitcases tended to contain. “And so, mine for the last five years. Though I try not to tell people I’m related to them, considering how they behave. And this is a good day, mind you.” 

"Is this sofa new?" Elrond awkwardly asks Maglor, to take off an edge that doesn’t exist until he opens his mouth, feeling the sofa’s plasticky sheen. "I don't remember it from when… from when we were last here. When I was last here. Sorry."

"Leather sofas are fashionable," Maglor explains, offering him a biscuit and smiling at Elrond’s inability to tell the difference between leather and pleather. "And you were last here twenty six years ago, Elrond. We didn’t have a sofa then.”

Supper is laid out painstakingly by Maglor, who threatened Elrond with a slipper-whacking for daring to offer his help. In the meantime, Elladan decides to put propriety aside and clamber right onto Elrond’s knee, his brother following suit. 

“All right, tell me,” Elrohir demands, clapping his hands together like a small, harried chef. “What did you bring for us? If you didn’t bring us anything, then you can’t stay here. That’s the rule, right Elladan?”

“Elrohir, I can hear you!” from the kitchen. “Behave!”

“Well,” Elrond taps his chin. “Your grandpa tells me that Elladan is an artist, and Elrohir loves airplanes… is that true?”

“I’m the plane one, and Elrohir likes drawing,” corrects Elladan, his eyes shining as Elrond hands over the requested presents: an easel and watercolour set for whichever twin it is that likes to draw, and a wind-up self-propelling Boeing for the other one, who enjoys planes. He watches their delight, and enjoys feeling something almost approaching the same, and actually offers a genuine laugh at the boys’ confusion at the enormous Easter eggs he’d gotten them. 

“We have chickens here too, you know,” Elrohir examines the egg, knocking on it with the practiced air of an agricultural inspector. “We have three!”

“Ginger, Tikka and Korma, they’re out back! Maedhros-uncle named them!” Elladan explains, rather unnecessarily, as nobody but Maedhros would have come up with such morbid names. 

Thankfully, the twins are too absorbed by the eggs to notice the minute stiffening of Elrond’s shoulders. 

Maglor had outdone himself with the dinner: cheera uperi, avoli poriyal, kadduka varathathu, and mutton fry - tossed spinach, baked pomfret, roasted mussels and fried goat. Piles of porotta, buttery, flaky flatbreads, made slanting towers over a mountain of rice, and two identical little flies greedily eyed the blackened tub of payasam — a dessert of sweetened milk, cashews, and vermicelli.

“Your old favourites,” he says, supervising the twins’ handwashing routine. “I would have made biryani too but, well, if I left these two to their own devices for a whole day, there would be no home for you to return to.”

The two of them catch each other’s eye, flushing awkwardly and looking away. It’s the way the word home came to Maglor’s lips so easily. The way the word home was used about a barely-standing old house on a crumbling cliff, that Elrond hasn’t seen in twenty six years. 

Biryani or not, it’s more food than he would have eaten in a week, back in London. He looks across the table and sees Maglor finally sitting down with a sigh, one twin on his lap demanding to be fed by hand, and All India Radio blaring out behind him nineteen to the dozen, discussing the municipality, the corruption that seemed rampant in the pipelaying business, and the tightening of protest restrictions under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s tightening fist. Maglor starts lecturing the boys, about not eating this, and eating too much of that. It all turns into a painful buzz in Elrond’s head, and once again the nameless anxiety wells up inside him as it did at the door, turning him nauseous and dizzy in turns. For one paralysingly guilty second, he wishes he was back in Devon, Arwen on his knee in the conservatory. Her little Book of Notes, and her list of favourite places. 

Elrond had longed so often and so deeply for India, for the food and language laying there right in front of him. He had spent twenty six years hoarding scraps about the land he grew up in and here it all lies before him - ripe for the harvest - and here he sits, dull and silent. Here he sits, letting it rot. He fills himself up with water so his hands had something to do, and tells Maglor that his stomach was upset by the flight (Elladan’s eyes gleam in excitement, only to be quelled by Maglor’s glare). His former foster father winks, takes it in his stride and makes a joke about leftovers. 

Elrond sits in silence as Maglor packs the twins off to bed, smiles at their clamouring to stay awake and play with him but doesn’t invite them to do so. Not tonight at least. When Maglor comes back down, children tucked away, they sit in silence for a while, Elrond dreading the breaking of the silence until he speaks just to avoid the sickening anticipation. 

“My daughter died,” he says blankly, as if Maglor had asked.

“I know. I’m sorry, Elrond.”

“Me too.”

“And your wife? Celebrían? Is she doing… not well, no. Is she coping? Will she come join you for some of the trip?”

“She’s in… she’s sectioned at the moment,” he starts, then realises he cannot continue. “Maybe later. Later. She… you cannot imagine…”

“You may be surprised at what I can imagine,” Maglor’s voice is dry. And then, “Elros died. In case you forgot. Elros died five years ago.”  

“I know, Maglor,” says Elrond, pretending not to notice how Maglor’s lips tighten at the use of his name. “I got your letter.”

“Good,” Maglor nods. He meets Elrond’s eyes, somewhat reproachful, his tone colder than Elrond has ever known it to be. “We got your card. And your cheque.”

“Oh, yes, for the boys — for their schooling,” Elrond falters, releasing slowly that Maglor isn’t exactly thanking him. “I… I hope it came in useful. It should have been enough to set them up a…”

“Maedhros was home when we received it,” Maglor does not elaborate, but his eyes swivel unconsciously over to the high, roaring fire in the grate. Elrond nods. He considers protesting, telling Maglor he thinks about Elros every day and that he had really-truly had meant well with the cheque and that it physically hurts him to have Maglor look him in the eye and act like he has forgotten Elros, like that was something he’s capable of doing, like he’s that cruel. 

He says nothing at all, because anything he says will require admitting that he hadn’t noticed that the cheque Maedhros tossed in the fire had never been cashed. Will require acknowledging the fact that when Elros died, the cheque arrived by first class airmail, a poor substitute for the hands of a twin. 

“Kindness is the birthright of every creature born to our world,” Maglor had told the thirteen year old Elrond, who was sent home from school because he’d been teased by his classmates for interfering when older boys stoned a street dog, beaten by said boys because he ran into their midst shouting and gave the dog such a fright that it reflexively ran away from its tormentors, stunned out of stillness, and then given a suspension for fighting even though all he did was get well and truly thrashed. “It’s one that many want and few give, let alone give so selflessly as you have. You should carry that bruise proudly — as proof that you’ve started the best journey of all, the deliverance of kindness.”

“But they’ll just do it again!” Elrond had exclaimed, trying his best not to cry. “I saved that dog but there’s going to be other dogs! There will always, always be other dogs.”

“Of course there will be. It is not in your power to save every dog from cruelty, and it never will be. The only people who hold such power in our world are people who wouldn’t think of saving a single dog, let alone all of them,” Maglor had squinted approvingly at the paste of turmeric and mint before warming the aluminium cup in his hands, spreading the mixture on the boy’s bruises. “But it was in your power to give that dog his birthright of kindness, no? And you did so, no matter what it cost you. Don’t you think that’s a pleasant thought, Elrond? Does that not make you feel a little less helpless?”

Elrond nodded, sitting quietly as Maglor continued tending to the wounds, the bubbling panic-hopelessness reducing to a gentle simmer. When Maglor was done, he’d run a turmeric-stained finger across his cheek to annoy him, before saying “and there will be other dogs, Elrond, but not from these same boys. Something tells me that they won’t be tormenting anything at all for a long time. At least the ringleader won’t.”

“Why not?” 

“Because ten minutes before you came running in, I had another phone call come in from the school, telling me to go pick Elros up for a week’s suspension. It seems your brother went and broke the older boy’s wrists, knocked him down and kicked them in apparently — less for teasing the dog, more for thrashing you. A little excessive in my eyes, but he meant well at least. Now, Maedhros has gone to get him, and after that we’ve been instructed to give you both a punishment, so… how does a bookstore trip, matinee show at the Crown theatre, and then dinner out sound to you, hm?”

For twenty six years, he’s pictured walking back into his childhood bedroom. The image in his mind ages, a year for every year he doesn’t return, five for the year he sent that cheque. The only constant is the emotional catharsis it has promised him, year in and year out, like a mirage. When he steps over the threshold he doesn’t fall to his knees and weep, and neither does he walk around its perimeter running amazed fingers alongside each wall like he’s in a filmi-song. He doesn’t even notice his old bicycle in pieces beside the bed like a grave marker. What Elrond does instead of all these things is turn right back around because Elros is sitting cross legged on his bed and his life is such a fucking joke that he refuses to deal with it right now. 

Elrond had spent six months watching out for Arwen in the corners of his days, catching her flickering here and there like wisps of fireless smoke. He would stop mid-step, mid-thought, as though his stillness might tether her, and yet the moment he turned, she would be gone — reduced back down to the soft simmer of the kettle or the faint scrape of a branch against his roof. Once, he’d been certain, cross-your-heart certain he saw her in the garden, and Cel had believed him, believed her her small hand was brushing the wilted petals of a rose, but when he blinked, it was gone and Cel looked at him with such hollow eyes like he’d killed their daughter.

Like he’d killed her again. 

All of England seemed to conspire in this cruel trickery, railway stations and roads and rivers all offering him fragments of her absence where her life had once been, and though he knew better, he could not stop himself from looking. He looked and looked and looked until Cel was sectioned and he realised he was drifting down the same current. Most Westerners come to India to find themselves. Elrond did not come to India to find himself. He came to India because he was perched on the cliff-edge of madness, and it was much easier to go mad in a bona-fidé, card-carrying madhouse than to go mad in England. At least here he’d not be out of place. 

So for Elros to turn up like he did... Well. You’d have marched out too. 

He drags his suitcase outside to the wide verandah — the house was built in the old feudal style, with an open courtyard in the middle and an external porch looking out at it. There are two raised platforms on each where you could sit or lie on, looking up at the stars, and he and Elros used to get to spend nights here together when they were being particularly good, or separately when they were being particularly bad. 

Maglor stands in the doorway in nothing but long white trousers, clearly roused from his sleep. “Elrond, there’s a bedroom for you. What are you doing?”

“It’s too hot,” he lies smoothly, and when he takes his own shirt off he’s sweaty enough that it’s almost believable. Maglor sighs, turns back inside and re-emerged with a pillow and armful of blankets, elbowing Elrond aside and ignoring his whispered protests that he didn’t need all that.

“Shut up,” he clicks his teeth, fluffing up a pillow. “It gets cold at dawn, and I don’t want you catching a chill. Who will be lumped with listening to you sniff and snort all day then, hm? Exactly, it will be Maglor! Always it is I. So hush.”

On the side-verandah, shaded by sloping eaves, Maglor’s kitchen spills beyond the walls, merging with the open air. Clay pots line the low ledge, their contents thickening under the sun; turmeric roots lie split and splayed on a woven mat, drying into twisted golden fingers. Bundles of curry leaves and red chillies swing, stir in the breeze. Jackfruit seeds, pale and slick, spread out to harden and dry into savoury snacks, while tamarind pulp darkens in a shallow tray. A pot of milk hangs from a branch, straining itself slowly into curd. Everything ripens, thickens, ferments—waits, suspended. 

His former father fusses and mutters over the blankets and his voice dissolves into the cacophony of the shadow they cast on the mosaic pillars, the damp welcome mat over the front step, the heavy first-door into the middle courtyard and the old kennel Celegorm built for his dogs, in which Elros had once locked him in ‘by accident’, the half-and-half curtains — all saying remember who loved you? 

It’s almost like it was. Down to the whispered stream of scolding, the complaints about sniffing, the way he laid out the mat, the blanket, the carpet. Down to the cricket orchestra in the background. It is very dark, the stars too muffled, and on nights like these, Elrond used to be a little scared. The crickets turned into lions, the wind into a thousand snakes, and he’d be very quiet about it because Elros wasn’t scared and he’d laugh at him. But Maedhros knew. On starless nights, he would slink out onto the porch and come lay on Elrond’s platform beside him, holding him close to his chest until the lions and snakes all cowered under his thunderous heartbeat. He’d sleep by his side and leave just as quietly at dawn, so Elros wouldn’t wake and tease his brother. 

He’d never told Maedhros he was afraid of the dark, but somehow he knew. His Baba, who once detonated a fist-sized bomb that took a single finger from a single policeman, the one who ordered a crowd-kettling and horse-trampling control measure against women on their way to an unlicensed grain market. Two days at the British Library had told Elrond of the policeman’s laurels and medals, the Times article about his recovery from the traumatic blast, a peerage for his goddamned finger. Sir Policeman to you, Elrond. 

Maedhros got his dues too: ten years in prison, a chargesheet designating him as a terrorist, and the taking-away of the two English boys living in torment under the wide-open roof of vicious, cruel criminals. His Baba the Terrorist, who would always, always find him under every starless sky, and lay beside him without a word. A monumental surge of longing threatens to overwhelm Elrond and when Maglor turns, he can’t help but blurt out “does Maedhros know I’m here?” 

“He does,” Maglor’s voice is measured. “He’s busy with the Party at the moment, he and Fingon. It’s been difficult, since Elros passed, they’ve been struggling to find a proper Branch secretary. They’re up in…”

“Isn’t he going to come see me?” he frowns. He hates how petulant he sounds, forty-three with a dead daughter and he’s standing here whining about his former foster father, a card-carrying terrorist, not wishing to see him. Maglor doesn’t answer, so he huffs through his nose because frankly he’s felt like a child all day and who better to witness your micro-tantrum than the person who once watched a four-year-old you throw a monumental one and sat on the ground beside you writing a song about it. The huff turns into a snort as he gets into the veritable nest Maglor made him. 

“What?”

Elrond smiles through a sudden wave of affection for the criss-cross of the straw mat under his back and the shadow of Maglor behind him, the first thing he’s really felt in months. He shrugs. “Nothing. I was just wondering… whether you still sang?”

“You wait till Friday and you’ll see,” Maglor laughs cryptically as he turns to go back inside, and Elrond counts the slap of his rubber slippers on the stairs. The crickets haven’t yet shut the hell up. It’s almost like it was in 1937, when he was three and two nations hadn’t yet clawed out of one. 

The sea still roars against the cliff beneath him, even though the river feeding it has died a slow death across the years he’d been away. He’s not really sure where it’s gone, poisoned by factories or buried beneath a dam, only that it has. Elrond falls asleep thinking of the first river he watched die, when he was only ten. No river is infinite, Maedhros had said to him that day. They are only as enduring as our care, only as alive as our love. And then his Baba, the terrorist, had wept. 

Chapter Text

Because Elrond’s life is a complete joke, it takes only a single walk into town to see that every second wall in Kozhikode boasts a faded poster of Elros, larger than life and surrounded by vivid red slogans, a hammer-and-sickle stamped beside every grin and raised fist. 

To understand why there’s a photo of Elros, well, of Comrade Tar-Minyatur on the vast majority of the walls, one needs to cast their minds to the aesthetically satisfactory yet rather ridiculous politics of the state of Kerala. Whilst India as a whole — in the seventies, at least — tended to normally veer between mild liberalism, romanticised dynasties, and milky-biscuit conservatism, a nation with a weakness for both demagoguery and populism from all sides of the political compass: Kerala had been, continues to be and forever would be a stalwart Marxist thorn in the national side. 

Western visitors to Kerala, depending upon their own political leanings and which eye they keep open when they sleep, are by turns either horrified or enthralled by the aesthetics of the average street. An Engels quote on most walls, enormous murals of Chè and Trotsky on others, statues raised and roads named after Communist revolutionaries, a literal shrine to the Baader-Meinhof Group and because even the card-carrying socialists of Kerala are not immune from the national penchant for pointless theatricality — a startling number of bus stops shaped like hammers-and-sickles. Some say that if you go to any market square in the north of the state, put your hands around your mouth and shout LENIN, MARX, CASTRO, IT’S TIME FOR DINNER, at least a dozen small, eager children would come running up to you, hands held out. However, even as Kerala revels in its own exceptionalism and turns its urban architecture into Ho Chi Minh themed wrapping paper, the truth of it is somewhat less exciting — that the Communism of Kerala is very different from the Communism of the Soviet Union, or China, or North Korea, in that Kerala Communism is somewhat mundane, and its (relative) success rests exclusively upon said mundanity. 

“It’s dustpan communism,” Maedhros, a devoted Party leader, used to tell the twins, who in turn would pretend to listen. Dustpan communism, in Maedhros-terms, was a genuine compliment because the man had a remarkable yet rather unhinged way with words. “The other leftists of the world, and pardon me for the exceptionalism here, boys, care too much about theoretical doctrines and sit around arguing whether gulags are more ethical than rationing. Here, our communists make sure the dustbins are taken out in time, and that everyone has a dustpan to brush up their own courtyard. In Russia, they are worrying about annexing every neighbouring state and in Korea they have turned into a Soviet satellite state whilst out here, in this little splatter of red in this big orange and green country, we make sure that every farmer has a piece of land and every child can read.”

The twins, all of six years old with no clue what annexation or theological doctrine or satellite state actually meant, would nod away seriously because Maedhros could make the driest section of theory sound like an adventure story. And Maedhros was, to be fair to him, far from the most navel-gazing theorist in the newly formed state, as exceptionalist about said state as he was. 

“You know, I’m starting to think this is a little too much, na? It’s all well and good for the townspeople and far be it from me to criticise the Party, but me personally, I don’t enjoy seeing my dead nephew drawn on every blank spot in this damn town,” snorts Celegorm, watching Elrond pause infront of a tall brick wall with a ten-foot Elros painted upon it. It’s not a particularly good rendition, but has a certain strange, fierce quality to it. His short cropped beard, ruddy cheeks tanned dark by the sun, piercing grey eyes and curly black hair brushing his shoulders. They used to look like two peas in a pod, him and Elros, and now his twin — Comrade Tar Minyatur, stands at twice his height, far more vivid than his own fine, straight locks hanging down his back, pale, near-transparent cheeks and eyes faded lighter than the grubbiest old quarry-brook. Like someone had taken an eraser to Elrond, collected up the rubbings, and used them to paint this larger-than-life mural. Next to Comrade Tar-Minyatur’s fist lay a bright red-and-black block quote, attested to the man himself: 

OUR NATION RUSHES TOWARD TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES, DAMS, BUILDINGS, BOMBS, CHANGING DAY BY DAY — BUT IT IS THE PEOPLE WHO ENDURE AS WONDERS ENDURE. PATCHWORK ROOFS, WEDDINGS CELEBRATED WITH BORROWED RICE, TEACHERS UNDER DRIPPING ROOFS. THE REVOLUTION DOES NOT LIVE WITHIN THE MAPMAKERS AND LAW-EATERS, BUT WITHIN THE FARMERS WHO PLANT TREES ON RECLAIMED LAND. CALL ME SMALL-MINDED AND PAROCHIAL IF YOU CHOOSE, BUT I WOULD RATHER SPEND MY DAYS IN THE SERVICE OF THE SMALL WONDERS OF MY TOWN, THAN DANCE FOR THE APPLAUSE OF BIGGER NATIONS.

Such words, thinks Elrond, a small, envious smile playing on his lips. If only poor Eärendil could see this, the chutiya sisterfucking Viceroy’s chutiya sisterfucking secretary would be spinning in his grave like an ill-tightened screw, bless him. He brings the camera to his face, screws back the lens and attempts to bring both Elros and his well-meant grandstanding into the frame at once — it is then he hears the tinkling. 

“Uncle!” He wrenches the camera away, points at one of Celegorm’s dogs, a mean-looking Alsatian squatting right under Tar-Minyatur’s boots. “Your dog!” 

“What?” Celegorm looks over at the dog, handrolled cigarette loose between his lips, making his words come out somewhat muffled. “Do dogs not shit in England? Ya Allah, it really must be paradise. Enid Blyton must have been a prophet.”

“No, I meant — it’s going on the mural! Call it off, surely it can’t…”

“Elrond, my boy,” he tells him quite seriously, as if worried about his mental state (a reasonable concern, if not for this particular reason). “The town is covered with murals of Elros. I can promise you that every single one of their feet are anointed with bucket after bucket of dog piss, man piss, goat piss, cow piss…”

Elrond suddenly remembers why it had always been Maedhros and Maglor who delivered the Party’s speeches and addresses, standing on the back of moving trucks with makeshift microphones, and why Celegorm had been relegated to the role of Party secretary and, these days, attack-dog handler. It seemed the local branch of the CPI (Marxist) had decided that if Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was to use national police as attack dogs, well then the CPI (M) would be using attack dogs as attack dogs. 

“There will be another Comrade Tar-Minyatur, and another, and another. Though when we will be allowed elections again, Allahu alaam, god knows. Have you not heard of the poem by Lord Byron? He was one of your people,” Celegorm nudges him as if Lord Byron happened to be Elrond’s close personal relative, before whistling out to his other dog. “Now listen. I know it by heart. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty —“

Elrond blinks as the other Alsatian, a cheerier one, bounds up towards them. “All right uncle, yes, yes — the lone and level sands. How many bloody dogs do you have?”

“Seventeen,” Celegorm tells him after a moment’s thought. “This is Chairman, and this is Rosa.”

“Chairman…” Elrond raises his eyebrows, reluctantly accepting one of the leashes, as if he hasn’t spent the last three days holding tightly to Elladan and Elrohir’s own leashes (which had been a Maglor-requirement for twins since time immemorial). “Certainly not, Celegorm-uncle. You are not telling me this dog is called Chairman Mao.”

“Yes, I am,” Celegorm looks affronted at the thought that he wouldn’t have called a dog Chairman Mao. “And the bitch is Rosa, full name Rosa Luxemberg. Don’t look so horrified, Elrond! You should see Finrod’s latest monstrosity he tried to kennel with me for a while (I told him to sit on a palm tree till he died of exposure, of course), a massive mastiff named Stalin.”

“You cannot name a dog Stalin, uncle, that’s just insensitive.” 

“OK, baba, then you come with me now itself,” Celegorm nods, businesslike, taking the leash back from Elrond. “Let’s go see Finrod and his bull mastiff now, and you can personally tell him that he should not name his dog Stalin because that English boy Comrade Maedhros’ found on the street says he can’t. No? I thought so.” 

Elrond grins as Celegorm waves goodbye, dragging his atrocious Alsatians behind him. 

“See you on Friday, uncle,” he calls out, and then the thought strikes him. “Oh, and where is the good Comrade now?” 

“Maedhros?” Celegorm pauses for a moment, now being dragged by the dogs himself. “Oh, Lakshwadeep. He’s got a kuthu ratheeb performance there, or some such thing. May or may not be back soon, I don’t know.” 

Elrond frowns. Not at the fact that Maedhros still partook in the flagellation ritual, because his Baba had been the type of person who couldn’t sleep without beating himself up in some form or the other, but at the divergence in location. He takes a deep breath, tries to not think of it, and looks back up at the mural. He can’t take a picture of it now of course, not after Chairman Mao left his own taxes at the doorstep, but still focuses on the image through the camera lens, as though he can’t bear to look at it otherwise. 

It had always been like that for him, ever since Elros left Devon to become Comrade Tar-Minyatur. Even when he guest-lectured on Kerala’s communist leanings during his PhD, even as he wrote that awful essay about him which he attached to the money order he shipped in lieu of his presence at the funeral, that awful essay about the divergence between twins, the difficulties of separated doppelgängers. 

He knows — has always known, even as he’d written the godforsaken essay — that none of his prosaic justifications obscure the reality, which was that the moment of Elros’ departure had, once and for all, resigned Elrond to a lifetime of inadequate mirrors and a face that quietly disappointed everyone who had known his brother. But Elrond has never been fond of reflections, has never really grown out of the five year old throwing fear-propelled tantrums at the sight of his own visage as opposed to his twin’s jauntier, brighter variation of it. He used to close his eyes when they walked by the river, take off his glasses after rainstorms, when the windows were washed clean. 

This is why Elrond takes a last look at the mural through his now-dusty lens. It is why he has spent years trying to write about his brother instead of himself, covering Elros in prose and circumstance, spending long academic theses meditating on embodiment, doppelgängers, writing story after story where nobody ends up dying. Where nobody stormed out of a chilly house in Devonshire, leaving their too-young, too-sad, too-blonde mother sobbing on the threshold, where nobody dropped children and nobody picked them up. All this and more, if only to avoid thinking if only I had reached out to him. If only I had tried. And it was why he scrawled out that essay, pages on pages of nonsense about displaced paternal histories, about one dead dad and two living ones when in truth it could all have been easily summed up in a sentence fragment: when Eärendil’s son died, it was Maedhros and Maglor’s hearts that broke. 

Elros had chosen to live as Comrade Tar-Minyatur, Branch Secretary of the Party in Kozhikode because he had realised early on in his life that there was no noble and clean way to save the world; the world was a bruising thing, from the dust that clung to his shoes to the smog that choked him. Comrade Tar-Minyatur, the sisterfucking chutiya Viceroy’s sisterfucking chutiya secretary’s firstborn son, gave himself wholly to the cause. His privilege, his ignorance, his doubts. Not because he desperately wished to win the election and belong to his constituents, but because the fight itself felt like belonging.

It was a strange kind of love, the one Comrade Tar-Minyatur had for India. It was nothing like the half-blind long-distance longing of his brother Elrond, but a love that left his hands rough and his heart raw, a love built not on reverence but persistence: a fierce belief that justice, like the nation itself, demanded not mere devotion but grit. 

Elrond looks at the words again, but this time CALL ME SMALL MINDED AND PAROCHIAL IF YOU CHOOSE turns into TO WHOM DOES THIS LAND BELONG, IF NOT TO THOSE WHOSE BLOOD ITS BUILDERS SPILT ON FOREIGN SOIL? 

The clenched fist becomes smaller, tighter, the nails long and shapely and the hair is almost the same but longer, brushing past a patent leather jacket with a lapel full of pins. STOP THE BOMB and NO NUCLEAR TESTS and RACISTS OUT. Arwen towers over him, towers over them all like she had that day on a small, wooden podium rolled out onto the College green. Elrond’s heart had hurt, watching her that day, pride and adoration swelling within him because Elros may have been dead but Arwen? Arwen, her fist held up on the college green, dark-eyed and as beautiful as she had been on the day Elrond and Celebrían had first set eyes on her. She had been four then, a shy thing whose parents, first-gen Bengali immigrants, had passed away in a car crash. It was meant to be a short foster placement, six-weeks, perhaps two months at most. They’d had her for fifteen years, because Elrond’s life was both full of parallels, and an enormous fucking joke. 

“Someone will write a book about you one day, you know,” he had said, driving her home that day, her speech ringing in his ears and the proud smile still soft on his lips. “When you change the world, I mean. Someone will write a book about you. That I know in my bones.”

“It better not be you,” she’d snorted. She had been mortified when Elrond, a decade ago, had published Sea Stories for Little Arwen. When she was nine, mind you, far too old for bedtime stories about distant and delightful Kerala. At least, that’s what she’d told her friends. “Ada, you write a book about me, and I’ll never speak to you again.” 

She’d made him swear in the car that he’d never write a book about her, hell, never mind a book, that he’d not even put her in a damn epigraph nor acknowledgement. In the end, it turned out Elrond couldn’t even give her a proper eulogy. 

My little Arwen was a starlit child. 

She and I and Cel knew she would change the world, would bring justice, we knew she would create wonders for this c— 

The problem was, all you fucking cunts knew that too. 

He hadn't elaborated further, not another word, and the eight-hundred strong crowd of students and strangers and mourners and reporters waited like leaky pens for the grim set of Elrond’s mouth to reopen. For him to apologise, perhaps. After five minutes of watching the professor stand silently at the podium, blank-faced and hard-eyed, the throng slowly realised that nothing Elrond could say would make Arwen’s eulogy any longer than three sentences. The first endearing, the last enduring, and in between them a promising thing cut short.

He’d stuck two fingers up, adjusted his College robe, and walked calmly off the stage. 

Elrond had not planned to cause a stir with a three-line-eulogy. He had typed out a page and a half, careful copperplate font, and dragged Celebrían out of bed that morning for long enough to run tired eyes across the page and say a ragged very very clever, El. All the stories he had fed through a thesaurus and ran a feather duster over, laid out neatly and precisely.

How the two of them had almost retrained as lifeguards when six-year-old Arwen took up swimming, how eight year old Arwen had been obsessed with seas and shipping lanes and plankton, how sixteen year old Arwen would carefully decant expensive wine into plastic bottles to share with her friends and top the bottles up with unidentifiable substances sold in unlabelled boxes. The speeches she gave as a ten year old, demanding double the sweets if she promised to not chatter away throughout the car ride. Demanding justice for weasels and stoats, camping out in front of some shitty bush the council planned to cut down. The little sums that made Arwen their Arwen, that Elrond had in fact been perfectly willing to share. The meaning-wells and the well-meants. 

"I couldn't," he said to Celebrían, later that night. She had padded through the house and found him cross-legged in his study, staring at nothing. "I couldn't give the eulogy. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't. I called them all cunts. I called them all fucking cunts because of what they did to her.” 

"Oh, El." 

“I lost my job,” he admitted quietly. “I’m to go in next week and clear out my study.”

“Did you?” Cel gave the first, fossilised laugh he’d heard from her since the day they got the call. “For what? Calling your employers fucking cunts?” 

She laughed because it was funny. Because Professor of  Children’s Writing and Visual Cultures, Dr. Elrond Peredhel, a rubbed-out version of his brother, had neither the face nor vocabulary to address a memorial service open to the public and call them all fucking cunts. It turned out, however, that Elrond — the man who little Arwen called Ada because she had a severe stutter at the age of six and couldn’t open words with consonants — had the face, vocabulary, and balls to do such a thing. Fitting and unsurprising, for the father of the fiercest activist Oxford University had the misfortune to experience. 

“Either that, or they found my planning permission application for a thirty-foot silver statue of her on the Grounds.”

She didn't question him about why on earth he was joking about planning permissions when his daughter, their daughter, was an unfinished, burnt-down building. It was Elrond. It was what he was. 

"I'm sorry, Cel. I didn’t mean to — to give that eulogy. You know I didn’t. I’m sorry.” 

"Yes," she stood in the doorway, watching his long fingers pull threads off the Turkish carpet. She looked bone-tired, though she had not left their bedroom that day until then. "I thought you might be." 

He waited until she left to open his eyes again, because he knew what sight awaited him. The same thing he had seen a second after the stretcher passed, as he stumbled amidst the wreckage, Ereinion holding him up. In the ash and dust, Arwen wore a circlet of little lights in her hair, tangled in messy locks blacker than the burnt marble of the Hall. She had looked at Elrond, and laughed, and there was a small hole at the corner of the laugh, just where it became a whistle, where a thirteen year old lacrosse-player's enormous elbow had once dislodged a tooth amidst a friendly-game, which his daughter had worn for the next six years like a badge of honour. 

And the sight of that whistly-little hole in her laugh had leeched all the control Elrond had over himself, turned him into a beast clawing at the closest thing, turned him inside out and held him over the dying embers of the Hall. And then memory too had failed him and when it returned, the sun had risen and there was vomit all down his shirt and a woman screaming and screaming in their study. He fell back asleep and when he rose again, there was no more screaming in the study. 

"I'm sorry I wasn't here," he’d said, after stumbling over to the next room to find her. "I was very tired, Cel."

"They had to sedate you, Ereinion said,” she told him blankly. “He brought you back here.”

Elrond nodded, looked down at his hands - ripped nails, blackened beds, dirt ground so far down into them that he did not wish to know what it was those hands had been doing. Part of Celebrían saw him, and all but shook with relief that at least he was there. Other parts of her still hung dazed and scattered across the room, blown there by the building pressure inside a burning building, by the impact of being showered with someone else's crime. She refused to think. She was not thinking. 

"Cel? Cel? Can you hear me?" He was kneeling now. She could hear him perfectly. She only wished he would stop saying her name - she had heard it enough today. 

“Go change your shirt,” she told him dully. “For god’s sake, Elrond. You look a mess. Go change now. There — there’ll be reporters at the door, Ereinion said. He said he’d try and hold them off but wouldn’t be able to for long.”

“Reporters?” Elrond paled. “Oh. Oh, god. For — no — I can’t, Cel, I can’t —“

“Get out, Elrond, please. Go change. Take a shower. You open the door like that and it will be all over the papers, you know it. Go.”

”Cel, what do you mean reporters?”

”You know what they’ll call her, Elrond,” she whispered. “You know what they’ll call her for this.”

”No, no, ab—“

”You know it, Elrond. You know they’ll call our little Arwen a —“

”NO!” 

She’d screamed then, at the sound of his raised voice. Once, but it was enough  

"Cel, I’m so sorry,” he grasped her hands, lowering himself on the floor, a foot away from her. Elrond looked wasted, she thought, though she wasn't sure which definition of the word applied. Maybe blasted, a bit like something that lived on the Richter scale, like something whose bones spent a lot of time shattering. 

“Change your shirt.”

“Cel, please.”

“I told you,” she said hollowly. “I told you a thousand times she was too young. And you said —“

“I know what I said,” he’d snapped, the second time he had ever raised his voice in her vicinity. “She was doing such good, Cel. And she wanted to, and people were listening to her.”

“Because she was just like her Uncle Elros, yes?” she looked across at him, her face white and set. “And where is Comrade Elros now? Where is our daughter, Elrond?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Change your shirt. Go shut the gate on the reporters. I’ll — please, Elrond. Please leave me be for a while.”

Elrond rose from the floor, paced, kicked a table, sat on it, twiddled his thumbs. She watched him listlessly, until he finally dragged in a breath, pushing all thoughts of Elros aside. “Arwen was a natural, Cel, and you and I both knew that. Arwen was a true — a true revolutionary, she’d understood what it took and she had been willing to put herself up there, to make those speeches and stand against some of the most powerful people in the country. Arwen pulled together the biggest rally Oxford had se—“

“Arwen,” Celebrían softly cut across him, the same three words she had repeated for the past year, the only change being a small, heavy shift of tenses. “Was nineteen.” 

It turns out that Maglor does indeed still sing. 

He’s dragged to the Friday performance by Elladan and Elrohir, who Maglor had all but dusted his hands off of, the moment Elrond had woken up to them poking him awake on the second day. They had demanded he recount to them every single symptom of jetlag, down from any suspicious tingle in his throat, to whether his bathroom habits had changed at all across the past twenty four hours. 

“I haven’t even had breakfast yet,” Elrond was complaining when Maglor walked in, took one look at the paleness of his face, and demanded he look after the boys for the entire day, and probably the next one too. And the one after. 

“Don’t you have school?” Elrond had asked Elrohir, who shook his head. 

“It’s the Emergency, don’t you know anything? Big-big Oxford degrees but no brain at all.”

“Does the Emergency mean schools are closed?” 

“No,” shrugged Elladan. “But our teacher is in jail.”

Much to his credit (and proving that three Oxford degrees weren’t a complete waste of time), it only takes Elrond a very short time to understand that he’s less a tourist in India and more a prisoner of it. India to Elrond was frozen still in 1951: the rivers were flush with silt, untroubled skies knew no smog, and the Emergency was but a glint in young Indira Gandhi’s eye. It’s like that, when you leave a place untouched in your mind, turn it into a shrine of sorts where nothing at all decays. It is then he understands the little deaths part and parcel of every homecoming. It is on the third day he understands that the land he loved is lost to him forever, reshaped by storms he never had to shelter from. Emergency-era India hadn’t become a stranger to him, it had jumped off a cliff before his very eyes. 

Unlike Elros, he had kept India locked so deeply in his chest and turned it into such a vital part of him that the lines on his palms turned into twin bicycle-tracks and the air he breathed turned into the sea-salt of Kozhikode. And though the salt preserved Elrond for all those decades away from the sea, it had also turned him so brittle that the Elrond-who-returned was nearly phantasmal, a spectre haunting a land that had died a long time ago. 

This, more than anything, is why Maglor – a man who sees a ghost story play out in every second person that steps through the threshold of the Library and has no desire to add to the count – sends the twins off with him. That, of course, is not what he tells the three of them. 

“I have looked after them for five years, it’s my statutory time off,” he declares, Comrade Maglor at his best. “And please remember, Elrond, that I have suffered the same running after you and Elros. This is Kerala, my boy, no ivory tower for you. Now go take them to the lake, supervise their bath, and if one of them drowns I will have your head and the other one’s head too. So behave!” 

It’s a plausible excuse. 

And if Maglor has to hide a grin when he watches Elrond return from the lake, half-clad and drenched head to toe, two reasonably clean boys trotting along beside him, we will say nothing of it. Like we will say nothing of how Elladan and Elrohir drag Elrond to a place of honour at Maglor’s weekly performance on the porch, shouting out “he has to go in front because he’s from England!”, their bright-red and completely mortified uncle wishing to sink through the floor. How the crowd thickens and the collection tin for the Library grows heavier and heavier as Maglor sings everything from raagas to ghazals to Communist marching songs, and how his apprentice, young Lindir, gives Elrond a thorough dressing down and lecture after he makes the mistake of daring to refer to the sitar as “his instrument” as opposed to “a part of him, flesh made wood”. How Elrond cannot help smiling at every note, joyous or mournful, how he only realises he’s reflexively tapping his foot when the twin on his lap gives him a firm wrench on the ear for jogging him, and how he stays behind when the crowds clear after the performance. How he silently helps Maglor pack away the instruments, just as he used to, falling so easily back into the quiet rituals of oiling wood and rubbing grease on tabla heads. 

“I saw those storybooks you gave the boys, Elrond,” Maglor turns to him at last, Lindir’s enormous sitar leaning against his chest. “Sea Stories. I never thought I’d see a storybook about our Kozhikode, published in England. I wish you had sent us at least one copy.”

“Sorry,” Elrond says awkwardly, biting his lip. Maglor sighs, smiles, and takes his hand in his. 

“Saarilla.” It’s all right. Or never mind. Or some combination of the two that neither really knows how to express in English. “You write beautifully.”

“Thanks,” Elrond smiles back, and then rolls his eyes. “Not according to Arwen, though. She said the publication of that book — including that photo of her at the back — was the equivalent of strapping a great big ‘kick me, my father is a freak’ sign on her back.”

“Yes, she looks like the type to say that,” Maglor had finished packing up the sitar, and sits on the porch platform, patting the space beside him. Elrond sits beside him, watching the stars wink into place. 

“Were those stories you told her then?”

Elrond takes a deep breath, wonders how long he can last this time, whether he can talk about her for longer than a sentence without lapsing into something embarrassing. 

“Yes, they were,” he kicks his feet slightly, sees Maglor’s hand rest on his knee as it used to when he was a small, fidgety child. Somehow, it gives him the strength to continue. “I used to tell her all those stories. Of Kappad beach, of that old beggar — remember him, the one who knew King Lear word-for-word, on SM Street?”

“I saw that!” Maglor’s shoulders shake in suppressed mirth. “And that one about Celegorm’s dog that he was so sure could speak German!”

“Nai!” Elrond barks out suddenly, the Malayalam word for dog, which happened to be close enough to the German word for no, that teenage Celegorm had been convinced beyond measure that the creature was a polyglot. He watches Maglor’s laughter heighten and then subside. 

“I’d promised to bring her here,” he admits. “With every story, I’d promised her. Kappad Beach. SM Street. Mananchira Park. Even that kennel your little brother calls a house. I’d sworn to her, promised her that she could go.”

“Oh, Elrond.”

“You believe me, don’t you?” Elrond asks quietly. “I truly wished for her to meet you. Not just on the phone. And Maedhros. And god, I would have died for her to meet Maedhros. I wished it, Maglor, I truly did. I promise.”

“No need for promises,” Maglor threads his fingers through Elrond’s. “I will always believe you. Now see, it’s night time, hm? The moon is full. No time for regrets in such bright moonlight, as I always say. You wrote that beautiful book. Your Arwen lives in it.”

Does she? 

Had he really written Sea Stories for Arwen? Or was it simply another incarnation of Maedhros’ wild kuthu-ratheeb performances? Elrond knew. Sequestered from and displaced within what was ostensibly his own country, his anxiety had latched onto India so tightly it began to dominate him. Denied the opportunity to belong to his present, he spun back to his past and made it his tool to ensure he would belong to a future. That was, to be truthful, why he’d written the book. Yet with the publication of Sea Stories for Little Arwen, Elrond had also inadvertently triggered the process of becoming both prisoner and architect of his own exile. He could never return to the India he knew, not because it was forbidden or because the Emergency had changed it, but because that India, had it ever existed, was now shut away in a small green picture-book published in someone else’s country, for someone else’s daughter.

Elrond shakes his head, trying to explain but feeling his throat tighten at last. “Sorry. I can’t talk more. It’s hard to speak of Arwen for too long. I get — I get too upset. I’m sorry, Maglor. Maybe later. Sorry.”

When he looks back up, blinking hard, he’s stunned to see that Maglor is biting back a grin. 

“What’s so funny?” 

“Oh, I was thinking of how abnormal your feelings are, Elrond,” the singer says dolefully. “Simply crazy you are, my boy. Total madness only, to find the thought of one’s recently passed daughter difficult. You are right to look so ashamed, right to apologise three times in one breath. See, it’s something nobody in this world has ever dared before, feeling sorrow! Allah, they should lock you up for crimes against humanity. How dare there be tears in your eyes, simply unforgivable. They should put you down, I think. I will call Celegorm now. Or our dear Prime Minister Indira.” 

It’s been so long since Elrond really, truly laughed, and even longer since he’s laughed like this, completely out-of-control, snorting ungracefully, red-faced, his whole body thrown as if by a fit. He’s surprised he still can! That there are still jokes like this, that he’s allowed to brush by them like this. And Maglor, sitting right beside him, shaking his head mournfully as if he were about to call the firing squad right then to put him out of his misery. 

“Abba, for god’s sake! You’re awful, really, this is just like the time you wrote that bloody song about the tantrum I threw when I was four!” and he doesn’t understand why Maglor is in tears now because the joke is funny but right, it’s not even that funny, it’s not funny enough to cry over, especially not considering the original joke was about not-crying and Maglor is telling him it’s nothing, that it’s nothing at all, dust and sand and grit, my boy. 

“What is it, Abba, what is it? Have I said something wrong?” he grabs the calloused hands worriedly, looking even more concerned as Maglor starts to laugh now. Elrond reflexively clicks his teeth in the regional signal for impatience, and it has Maglor laughing even harder, tears now truly from mirth. 

“Oh, look at you,” he says at last, shaking his head slightly, patting Elrond’s cheek jokingly before wiping his own. He mimics the noise, a sharp click and then sucking of the teeth, and then laughs again. “It comes back so fast, doesn’t it? My Elrond, at my door at last.”  

He isn’t even thinking of Maglor when he realises. He’s lying on his makeshift bed on the porch, looking up at the unbearable moon and he’s thinking of Maedhros. He’s thinking of his Baba because that’s what he’s done every night as long as he can remember, before falling to sleep and facing the darkness beneath his eyelids, he thinks of Maedhros’ heart beating right beneath his ear. Tonight, his eyes widen as he realises. He truly hadn’t noticed, not earlier, when speaking with Maglor. He hadn’t noticed how easily Abba slipped out of him, how it slid right into his sentences as if pulled by a powerful magnet, slotting perfectly into its old place. 

Chapter Text

“ACQUITTED!” shouts the caller down the line. “ACQUITTED, I TELL YOU!”

“Sorry? Pardon me, are you calling to talk to Comr—“ Elrond wrinkles his nose, holding the landline far from his face, the sudden roar of sound on the other end enough to deafen a bat. “If you’re after Comrade Maglor, he’s out, he’ll be back in the evening! Hello? Who is this?”

“ELROND OF INDIA, HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME ALREADY? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS TELEPHONE CALL IS C—“

Ah. 

Nobody would call him Elrond of India, vis a vis Clive of the same, and mean it as an endearment — aside from Professor Sir Ereinion Gil-galad, KBE: the deservedly lauded, remarkably well-published and worryingly eccentric Mughal historian who regularly buzzed around College gatherings dressed up as Emperor Jahangir. A man as well meaning as a nurse, as white as a moonflower, yet as endearingly confident that he had been at least one if not two Mughal Emperors in a past life as someone who had been at least one if not two Mughal Emperors in a past life, though which one it was depended upon his research objectives at the time. 

In seven years time, most tabloid reporters and their discerning readers would have reason to be extremely familiar with the name Ereinion Gil-galad. Not because his academic work broke into the mainstream and neither did he die, far from it — he did, however, engage in a long and protracted courtroom battle with the pop singer Madonna after suing her for wearing a belt with the word BOYTOY on it on the cover of Like A Virgin. Professor Gil-galad, who ended up winning the suit and a hefty settlement, claimed he had trademarked the word as it was used colloquially, as it was his term of endearment for Glorfindel — coach of the rowing First-team and proud trophy boyfriend who has been, still is and forever will be happy to live as a kept man. Needless to say, Professor Gil-galad was a controversial figure in the gay community, the academic community as well as his own neighbourhood’s dog walkers association. 

In short, Ereinion Gil-galad was the University of Oxford’s most severe case of incurable pain in the arse (incurable because the knighthood meant that they could not fire him, no matter how many times he attempted to chain himself to the railings and demand ‘imminent decolonisation’), an outstandingly irritating person to be around, and Elrond’s very best friend in the world. 

“Oh, Ereinion! For the love of…” Elrond laughs into the telephone, before gasping. “Acquitted? What? You! Oh, oh, thank goodness. I’m so relieved, you… what, all charges clear?”

“Scot free, old friend, no longer am I part of the criminal underbelly of Oxford,” even through the crackly line, Gil-galad sounds somewhat morose, as if he’d quite enjoyed being part of said criminal underbelly. “Absolutely no consequences whatsoever. And now, you are costing me hard-earned wealth with your sighs of relief, Elrond! Quick now — how is India?”

“Oh, it’s been only… what, three weeks? But yes, it’s… I suppose,” Elrond looks around to make sure he is, in fact, alone. “I can breathe easier. That’s a certainty. The Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency is coming to a close, so the people are more…”

“Celebratory? Oh, one moment — Glorfindel, my dove, top the gin up and make it a double please,” Gil-galad called out. “We’re at the Red Lion near Didcot, I’ve thrown a get out of prison party, though I suppose I wasn’t exactly in prison. Semantics, semantics! So, it is in fact their telephone that I am using and thus their money you waste by every second of unnecessary exposition. Tell me about you, dearest, how are you? How are your red-blooded revolutionary fathers?”

“Maglor has been making me do childcare,” Elrond laughs into the phone again, hearing Gil-galad give a full body shudder as Glorfindel clearly brought him the wrong brand of tonic. “Twins, Elros’ boys. And I’ve seen Celegorm, who remains as much of a liability as he was when I left. Runs a kennel, apparently.”

“And your other father? Dearest Comrade Maedhros, whom I would love to meet — a gentleman’s gentleman, much like myself. And who was his dear friend again, Fingon? Have they been helping with your… what, childcare?”

Elrond has to bite his lip to stifle a grin at the thought of what Maedhros would do to Gil-galad had he ever uttered the words “gentleman’s gentleman” in front of him. Probably get himself another prison sentence. He sighs heavily. “I haven’t seen him yet, Gil. He’s… he’s away.”

"Away?" Gil exclaims. "What, his prodigal baby returned after a quarter century and he's away? You had better inform me in the next five seconds that our dearest friend is currently getting a kidney transplant, and give me the address of the hospital so I can send him a note telling the fellow to hurry up. No, open-heart surgery. There is nothing else that would justify such an absence to me, I tell you that." 

Just to clarify: Gil-galad's habit of acting as though he knows every inch of Elrond's life in India is, whilst somewhat grating, generally to Elrond's advantage. It was Gil-galad’s exact tendency to poke his nose into other people's shite that had landed him in India, and that, Elrond supposes, was a good thing. After all, two months ago, it had been Gil-galad who came across him standing at the makeshift fence marking out the burnt-black wreckage of Buller Hall, watching the work teams knock down the existing walls. The Professor would, for once, have left him alone but had seen that Elrond's hand was wrapped up in a small burn-bandage, and the sight of it had rested what little self-control he had when it came to interfering. 

“Kettle accident? Picked a premature sausage from the frying pan?” he’d smiled, though his eyes dared Elrond to claim it was something so mundane. But Elrond had been tired of pretending, so he hadn’t even bothered to come up with an excuse. 

“Petrol rag,” he said tiredly, waving the bandaged hand. “Through the letterbox.”

“Students?” Gil-galad narrowed his eyes, shaking his head as Elrond shrugged. “They should bring back corporal punishment. Just for a while, I say, and just for long enough so I can whack these ones and these ones only.”

“You know the statue?” Elrond huffed out a laugh, pointing across the fence. “The one she tried to topple.”

“Buller?”

“They’ve salvaged it,” Elrond continued monotonously. “They’re reinstalling it at Magdalen, over the roof. Twice as tall as it had been in Buller Hall. It was for nothing. All of it was for nothing, Ereinion, my daughter is dead and the statue she… they’re keeping it.”

The historian paused, before placing a hand on Elrond’s back: “my friend, do you trust me?”

That had been the first and only stupid question of Gil-Galad’s life, Elrond would realise later. 

Did he trust him? 

The reason Professor Sir Ereinion Gil-galad KBE received a remarkable set of scars on his knuckles and the reason he received an acquittal at the crown court were one and the same. On the night of the great and terrible burning, the night that Arwen died, Gil-galad had held up his half-conscious best friend with one arm, keeping him from running into the fire himself. And when a policeman told them he’d seen Arwen succumbing to the smoke but had not gone in after her, as she had been the only one in the building, Gil-galad had calmly raised his other arm and backhanded the officer so hard across the mouth that he’d knocked two of his teeth out in one. 

“Semantics, my dear friends,” the professor had shrugged in court, rather cheerfully, extravagantly waving his hands at the judge. “I did not hit him because he was a useless waste of the taxpayer’s contributions, even though I know we all agree he deserves a beating for that too. I hit him because he, a public servant, lied to my face telling me he had seen something when in reality, he’d watched.” 

Gil-galad had the irritating yet impressive trait of turning absolutely everything into a performance, before pinning his opponent to the walls like an entomologist's favourite butterfly. And this is why, after over two hours of the professor showboating and strutting about, when asked for any extenuating circumstances, Gil-galad glared at everyone in a way that had them thinking he might have had a point with the reincarnation claim. 

“The officer looked into my eyes and told me that he was under orders to not save a child, and I do not give a damn about pedantries about her age, she was a child, because she had made the decision to damage a listed building. The girl’s father was beside me, delirious with grief and begging — begging — this public servant, this man who is paid a salary from our pockets, to go in after her. Do you understand me? Begging him. And he had refused to do so, point blank. Was that in the incident report where every single dentistry bill was listed out? No! I thought not!”

“A listed building the size of a large shed, and I am a historian as you know. I know the importance of heritage more than any of you here, I know that public money has gone to maintain that statue. But that was all. Nobody was hurt but her. Nobody was pulled out in a stretcher but her,” Gil-galad had shook then, his remarkable composure draining from him. He’d looked old in his patterned shirt, like something draped in a bigger creature’s skin. “I loved that girl like a daughter. I stood there listening to Elrond beg this man to do his damned job, and this waste of space shook him off like a tick – looked me in the eye and called her… this child. You know what he called her. I lost it. That's all there is to it. I'd do it again."  

Did Elrond trust Gil-galad? He trusted him more than he trusted himself.

“Then listen to me, Elrond," he'd said, outside the former wreckage and current construction site. "You need to leave this place. Not for good, but for now.”

“What good would that do, hm?”

“A sense of hope, perhaps. This kind of loss… I just, it will pull you under. I will not have it take you.”

“What hope is there, Ereinion?” he breathed, shaking his head. “What hope is there for the world when such things are not only accepted and condoned, but encouraged? How could I have let my child give herself to a cause doomed before it even began, what use did her words have against the earthly powers of violence?” 

“All you can do,” Gil-galad had said to him, the din of deconstruction all around them. “Is to re-dream. Every lost chance and missed future you string around your neck is a heavier and heavier burden that will one day pull you down into the earth. Go to India, Elrond. Stand on the shore. Build another world, a good world, an impossible one, confound and redraw the boundaries you told yourself were immovable.”

Elrond nodded, turning away from the construction site. He tried to smile at Gil-galad, and for the first time thought of a sky that wasn't the dull, morgue-coloured sheet pulled over Buller Hall. 

“Look,” Gil-galad had grinned then, raising his fist and holding it out horizontally, the jagged scars across the knuckles still livid enough to make him wince. “Wound twins!”

Elrond laughed despite himself, and then frowned: “your ring! Where has it… did you lose it?” 

“Ah, my greatest weapon,” the Professor winked. “I sent it back in when I gave back the KBE.”

“You gave back your knighthood?”

“Well, yes,” Gil-galad put on an expression of faux-sorrow. “It was the worst day of my life, my dear fellow. Since then we have been starving on the street, begging for scraps. Of course I handed back the damned knighthood, Elrond. And I told them where they could shove it too. I'm certain the queen's not read a ruder letter, well, if she reads these herself, that is. Perhaps I should send a telegram too.”

“Oh, Gil…” Elrond’s voice cracked, and Gil-galad’s face had grown serious again. 

“Don’t, Elrond. I couldn’t hold on to such an accursed thing, not after… I only wish I’d thrown it in their faces. It is, as you know, a weapon of violence — an effective one too, mind you, on the right hand.”

Gil-galad had wrestled him home and into bed on the awful night of the fire, holding him tight, even as Elrond began shouting and raving in the streets. And then, without being asked to and without even a second thought, he had taken on the unbearable task of informing Celebrían, sitting beside her for hours through it, clutching her hand and crying with her.  And then he stood outside the house until daybreak, Glorfindel in tow like a gilded bulldog, not letting a single reporter past the gates. 

Gil-galad had always believed that history was more than the study of dates and events — it was rare in the seventies, this view, critical historiography not the hot topic it is today. Gil-galad was known as an eccentric because he taught not of war nor conquest but the stories of human resilience, of how civilisation after civilisation carried on after loss and ruin. In the lecture theatre, he spoke of revolution and empire as introductions, before revealing that his real subjects were the divergent aftermaths of every catastrophic rupture: the letters written to absent sons, the rebuilding of homes after the ashes cooled, the memorialisation of the unbearable, the consumption of guilt — and then, the writing of histories. That, of course, was where he came in. 

Grief, he knew, did not only greatly influence the writing of history but had a brutal history all its own. Grief left traces, demanded immediate interpretation, it said look at me, look at me, no, just me! Grief had been known to drive the greatest of men to the knife’s edge. And that, of course, was where he came in. 

When Cel had to be sectioned, Gil-galad had driven Elrond home and made him watch two full seasons of his own terrible guilty-pleasure television programme. No breaks. He didn’t say a word, mind you, a rare occurrence for famed Mughal historian Professor Sir Ereinion Gil-galad KBE, just sat with him. There are times we need such wordlessness in our lives: not wondrous and mystical silences but rather the warm stillness of listening, of giving. It is only because of Gil-galad that for the rest of his life, Elrond’s memory of those blindingly dark first weeks would go hand in hand with god-awful reruns of Mind Your Language. 

Elrond closes his eyes before bringing the receiver back to his lips, clearing his throat as Gil-galad finishes describing all the various ailments that would justify Maedhros not yet showing his face, and then ventures: "have you seen her yet?" 

"Cel?" Gil asks immediately, and Elrond is grateful he doesn't need to endure a second set of theatrics. "Yes, yes, sorry. I didn't hear the question. Speak up, El." 

"Yes, have you… have you been to visit?" he asks, a curl of the phone call in his mouth, an unshakeable, anxious habit. "Is she doing a little better? Even just a little?" 

"Elrond, stop fussing about," Gil's voice is stern all of a sudden, the stern-ness seeming to turn even the pub-hubbub behind him down to a low buzz. This, Elrond supposes, is why Oxford hasn't actually fired him yet, acquittal and un-knighted and all. "She's fine. And she said she'll call soon, that she'll try to ask if she can, that is. So keep an ear out."

"Truly?" Elrond leans forward, phone pressed so tight to his face his ear starts to sting. "She will? Does she… does she mind? Is she better? Gil, please!" 

"Hush, I said she'll call, didn't I? Oh, and I'll call next week too. Aragorn has something in mind it seems, politically speaking, and from what I'm hearing, I'd like to take part in his… something as well. I thought, well, if I'm to be a nasty little criminal, I might just go all the way."

"What is it?" but Gil had already put down the phone. Elrond stiffens, hand tightening on his knee at the sound of Arwen's boyfriend – well, former boyfriend – deputy editor of the student newspaper Cherwell, and frankly entirely undeserving of his daughter (if you asked him). Though Elrond knows, as he puts the receiver down on his end too, that it's less that Aragorn was particularly unworthy of anything and more that his attitude to the boy had been frozen in the two-week stage, because he and Arwen had only been with each other for two weeks when… 

Well, at least Cel is all right, he tells himself, wiping his sweaty hands on his slacks. He's been sweating far more than he remembers sweating in India, and it's the kind of thing Gil-Galad would probably diagnose with five syllables about displacement or tell him he had emotional diarrhoea or something similarly revolting. 

That's when he sees the pamphlet half falling out of the bookcase. A political leaflet, something, something endorsement of some other minor politician. The front page had a photo of the local MP, describing how remarkable this candidate seemed to be. The second had Elros, who gave a similarly glowing review, citing a set of projects he's worked with the person being endorsed. The third page features Maedhros, glaring out at the world:

"HE'S BETTER THAN THE OTHER FELLOW." 

Elrond can't help laughing. Another real one, because they keep creeping up on him these days, like little-boy fingers poking him awake or rolling him off the porch platform. 

Maedhros takes up much of the page. His dark green shirt shrouds him like moss on a stronghold and sunlight brushes at his hair, so softly Elrond feels brittle in comparison. His right arm ends at the wrist because much like his adopted son, Elrond's Baba's life was a fucking joke as well, and the tiny bomb that lost a policeman his finger had, in fact, taken Maedhros' entire hand off. 

Even so, seeing him feels like it always does. The love comes first in a fizzy, clarifying froth, but longing follows promptly with a harsh squeeze of his throat. And then he’s smiling, teeth and all. It’s the sole thing here since Elrond's return that doesn’t feel irrevocably altered. Not his father, no, but how it feels to see him. Dark eyes, henna-dyed hair and brows, bright red because he'd gone grey at seventeen and, well, refused to succumb to such a thing. 

But now, looking at that leaflet, Elrond can’t think of another word to describe his father aside from tremulous. Perhaps it’s not the kind of word one describes a father with, certainly not a father like Maedhros, a man who spent years in prison for ostensibly violent reasons. But he can’t think of another word. He can’t think of another word that tiptoes nervously in the periphery of his life, a word that crouches and waits and shivers each time he’s called Baba. A word that knows there are so many others that could take its place and spends all its time afraid of being replaced. 

It’s like figuring out the perfect sentence. The perfect sentence for his Baba, the terrorist. Truly it’s how Elrond has always tried to think of his days in India since he was packed off back to England, like a book in which he was simply a trapped deuteragonist. Perfect sentences made that life feel like someone else’s story, a favourite character he had imprinted on rather than a shrinking raft he couldn’t escape. There on the plane, decades before he’d even thought of Sea Stories, Elrond had become a writer. 

Elrond laughs, noticing that whoever printed the campaign leaflet cut off a good half of Maedhros’ shoulder. He seems too big for such a small bit of paper. Maedhros is too big for anywhere, really: too much, too loud, too brash, too loving, too harsh. He’s soft only under starless skies. Such intense love coiled tight into a single man, the capacity of thousands with the needs of one. In another world, or another country, Maedhros would have been allowed to let it all spring loose and love with abandon. 

In this world though, his father looks like he’s had a whole life drained from him and the empty parts torn up. How exhausted he has become across these dark times. How strange it must be, the first time you look in a mirror and realise you have lost what made you human. Still, Elrond is overwhelmed by love, the need to go to his Baba and have him do what he did to the twins every day when he dropped them off at school to make sure they (well, Elros) didn’t bunk classes. He would kneel, take an inventory of bookbag, lunchbox, cheeks, nose, eyes, hair, heart, kiss-on-forehead. Elrond wants to pull his father to his chest and try to hold him together, fall at his feet and beg for forgiveness, grovel on his knees like a dog. 

He traces the face again with his finger and feels exceedingly childish but lets the moment go on for a little longer before he pulls himself back into his life.  

Elrond wonders if he should sit on the pleather sofa and have a big fat cry. Well, should and should not aren’t the issue here — of course he should, he hasn’t since he got here and it might shake off whatever it was that was using his chest to practice sailor’s knots. It’s not even a question of can or can’t: since the loss of Arwen, he’s been privy to grief’s greatest party trick — the ability to weep at the drop of a hat, at the drop of fuckall, really. 

He’d cried at the airport as Gil-galad waved him off to the departures lounge from the second floor, as if he were off to a warzone instead of a milquetoast seaside town, though that storm thankfully didn’t last too long because his friend started dramatically miming cutting his throat if he didn’t stop, and frankly Elrond has had enough people in his life face terrorism charges that he’d stopped at once before a border guard noticed Gil-galad’s ministrations. He’d once stood in line at the local butcher and inexplicably remembered the time five-year-old Arwen discovered toad-in-the-hole didn’t involve toad meat, and how she was genuinely quite upset over it, how she sobbed in his arms and told him she wanted to have eaten toads and that she told all her friends that she ate toads and now she's a liar and obviously Elrond cried about it in line at the butcher's because his life was a fucking joke. 

“It was humiliating,” he’d told Gil-galad in the pub later, cheeks still flushed with embarrassment. “Everyone just… stood there watching. And I couldn't bloody stop. This right in the covered market too. I'll have to start going to Tesco now, I suppose." 

“Oh, don’t worry, love,” Gil-galad shrugged, patting him on the shoulder. “They probably thought you were a particularly empathetic vegetarian. Call me next time and I’ll take you to my dog’s grooming parlour. We can pretend you’re opposed to dip-dyeing poodles. Which, in my personal opinion, you should be.” 

No, the question was point or pointless. Ever since he'd arrived in Kerala, it had seemed simply pointless to waste his time crying. Not that he didn't want to, no, but that it feels useless. Like this ground has been watered enough by tears and him adding to it wouldn't make a difference to anyone's life. Not even his own. He looks back at the shelf in which he'd placed the pamphlet, like he has X-Ray vision and can see Maedhros' eyes burning holes through him. He doesn't cry, but nor does he pick the pamphlet up and look at it again. As he stands up and decides to not spend the day rotting on the sofa and fetches his camera, Elrond is almost certain he can hear Arwen laughing at him for considering 'getting up off the sofa' a particular achievement. 

“But what would you have liked to see, if someone wrote that book about you?” He’d laughed at her, the day she gave that speech. They'd just gotten home and they'd both forgotten their keys and had to call Cel sheepishly, and went around the corner to the off-license they liked to frequent every time both of them ended up forgetting their key, which was somewhat often. Arwen narrowed her eyes as she picked out a series of increasingly terrible sweets for them to share, suspicious about his intention as if another Sea Stories hid behind his words. “Really, Arwen, tell me. You and I both know that someday, someone will write that book — when you topple that statue. Hell, even if you don’t.”

"Absolutely not," she'd shaken her head, pushing him aside because she wanted to pay for their sweets with whatever she'd earned from her shifts at that very same off-licence last summer. "Ada, I don't trust you, not after you printed that awful photo of me in Sea Stories! No. No books, no you!"

"I promise, it won't be me… though I can't promise you Gil-galad won't," he'd laughed as she tried walking faster, away from him, and then grabbed her hand, raising all his fingers above his face. "All right, sorry, sorry! Just my little joke, Arwen. Promise, see, no fingers. Tell me. What would you like to see in that book?"

“I mean, I don’t know,” Arwen shrugged, holding out a licorice bootlace as a peace offering. The two of them sat on the threshold leading up to the house, because the porch key had been on the same keyring as their house key, and separating them had never been a precaution either of them took, no matter how often they had to sit sheepishly on this very step, sharing horrible sweets. "I'd not want a book written about me, Ada. Really."

Elrond shook his head gravely, picked out a white-chocolate mouse, and then grinned, beheading it in one. "That's what Gandhi said too. Well, he must have. And that's not the question. You don't get to choose whether or not you get a book about you, you only get to choose the story they do or don't decide to tell."

“I think toppling the statue would be book enough for me. There’s nothing particularly interesting about my life, no matter what my beloved writerly philosopher of a father seems to think. I don’t want to be anyone’s Booker Prize. The toppling, yes, I think that would tell the whole story.” 

“Would it tell your story though?”

Arwen had nodded, suddenly seeming far older than nineteen. And then she popped something cherry scented between her teeth and crushed it and was all of six again. “It would tell them, I suppose. Tell them I was here. Tell them that I tried.” 

_______________________________________

“Maedhros! Maedhros-ikka!” Maglor tightens his grip on the twins and begins pulling them through the crowd, making a beeline for the bright-red henna-dyed head a foot taller than all the others. “Ikka! Turn around, Maedhros! For god’s sake! Comrade!” 

The head spins around, waves when it catches sight of Maglor and grins ear-to-ear when it sees the twins. “Elladan and Elrohir? Come, let uncle see you properly, climb onto me, just like that! So big you’ve both become in just one month!” To Maglor, he narrows his eyes. “Salaam alaikum, brother, and what the hell have I told you about greeting me in public?”

Maglor rolls his eyes, making a beeline towards the Indian Coffee Shop outlet he spots, divesting Maedhros of one of the twins and grabbing his arm till he walks in step with the taller man. “Walaikum as-salaam. Yes, yes, I forgot, calm down. No calling you ikka in public.”

Ikka, for the Muslim communities of Northern Kerala, even those who aren't particularly or at all religious, like the red-blooded, card-carrying agnostics, those Fëanorians, means older brother — a term often used by people you had absolutely no blood relation to, to signify respect. This is how it is, in Kerala. You don't have to be particularly or at all religious to be part of a culture, or a subculture, or even whatever it is that Maedhros and his fifteen fellow flagellants call themselves. Ikka means older-brother, and anyone can call you that. Maedhros, however, is the only one who takes umbrage, and it has nothing to do with respect or relations. 

"Correct," he gives Maglor a thumbs up as he retrieves the other twin from him and sits them both down on his lap, waving to the waiter to bring his usual order. "And why is that?" 

"Because you have saved that address for Celegorm and Caranthir. Correct, Comrade?" 

Comrade is indeed correct, in that Comrade has been the only address Maedhros has let anyone use for him, regardless of age. This is less, however, due to any awkwardness around names and titles, only a little to do with his fervently held political stances, and frankly even has very little to do with the fact that anyone who grew up with six younger brothers would soon find ikka a rather tiring term. Really, it's more to do with efficiency and categorisation. That is, if only Celegorm and Caranthir were allowed to call him ikka, then it would be far easier for him to ignore the two of them by completely tuning out any time he hears the word at all. 

They're in the Indian Coffee House because said national chain is the only one Maedhros, the ever-dedicated comrade, would deign to go in, namely because the ICH had been set up in opposition to all the other Indian coffee houses during the days of the Raj, into which Indians were not allowed entry unless they had something to do with dish rags or pot washing. 

As if its beginnings weren't revolutionary enough, the mid-fifties saw the ICH wholeheartedly move even further left from Nehruvian socialism and become outright Communist (in the dustpan sense, it has to be said) after yet another meddling Marxist from Kerala encouraged the workers to set up a co-operative. In the words of Maedhros Fëanorian, "it's the only damn establishment in this country where I don't want to shove a fist up the arse of whoever owns it, pull out his brains, and shove them back up his arse" (whilst Maedhros was not a terrorist, there had been several reasons why people were willing to believe he might have committed at least a little bit of terrorism, his way with words being one of them). The coffee houses had, of course, been closed for the vast majority of the Emergency. The fact that it had even opened, to Maedhros, is like the advent of spring, and so he orders a plate of small cakes for the children — primarily to shut them up so he and Maglor could talk. 

"Maedhros, he's asking for you," Maglor cuts to the chase, looking over at the boys to make sure they remained out of earshot. "Every day. You can't just stay away forever. I told him you were in Kannur for Party business, but our remarkable brother has gone and told him you're in Lakshadweep for the ratheeb. So he clearly knows there's something up." 

Maedhros shakes his head: "I told you a hundred times that Celegorm is a liability. Couldn't you have told Elrond he died? Would that not have been better for the world, if more people think Celegorm is dead? Why did you let him go see Celegorm in the first week itself? What, wanted to see his dogs, did he?" 

"Stop changing the subject," Maglor snaps, reaching out automatically behind him to steady Elladan's tipping chair and to give both boys a quick glare. "Maedhros. Come home. See him at least once. He asks for you every single evening, and you know that he will find out you're still here. He's started asking around town." 

"Is that so?" Maedhros raises his eyebrows menacingly. "Good. You come tell me which bastard tells him where I am, and I'll make sure whoever it is doesn't walk for days." 

"Maedhros!" Maglor slaps a hand on the table, flushing as fellow diners look curiously at them, and lowering his voice. "Stop whatever prideful nonsense has you doing all this. Come home, see our boy, ikka, please. He's so unhappy, and he's asking for you." 

"I won't," Maedhros tightens his lips, the tip of his nose paling dangerously, as it tends to when he's quietly furious. "Maglor, I am not going to sit here and talk to you about Elrond, so don't even try. You listen to me, the state of Emergency is to end in a few months if Caranthir's sources are correct, and there will be an election all around. I need to —" 

“Ikka, you love him. Please, just one day.. Come for dinner, you don’t have to stay even. Bring Fingon also, just…”

“I told you not to call me that,” Maedhros’ voice is tight, controlled. “If that boy did not want to come home for the past twenty six years, then he's not going to die if I don't grovel at his feet." 

"That's not fair. You know that isn't fair. Maedhros, it isn't good to let pride keep you from…"

"You don't know the half of it," Maedhros snarls, his old temper rising, unaware that the twins were rising from their table, wide eyed. "I've told you to keep your mouth shut about this, Maglor, I have told you for months! Do you want me to clear your ears out for you?" 

"That nonsense won't work on me and you know it. You weren't like this, Maedhros, not even a year ago. You were annoyed at him, yes, but this? No, this is new. What's your problem? He's asked for you every evening, ikka!" 

"Are you finished?" 

"His daughter is dead! It's the least —" 

"I KNOW HIS DAUGHTER IS DEAD!" Maedhros roars, and when he comes back to himself after the split-second loss of control he realises he's standing and a glass lies shattered at his feet and the cafe is pin-drop silent, a rarity in any Indian environment. The twins are shaking, and Maglor's face is hard as he gathers the crying Elladan to him, ushering him out of the cafe to calm him down. Maedhros sinks back into his chair, hand over his face, breathing slowly as he does after the ratheeb performances. After a few minutes, he realises Elrohir is sitting close to him, pale in fear. The old rot eats at him. He forces a smile onto his face. 

"Sorry, Elrohir," he squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again. "Sorry. And say Maedhros-uncle is very sorry to Elladan also, from me. Can you do that?" 

The boy nods, though he's still subdued, and Maedhros hopes he won't cry too because if he does then — god. He's teetering at the edge. The rot crawls all across the floorboards, like there's a dead mouse under the floorboards, just like there is in his house. The rot pulls at his feet. He smiles again, pokes at a little green book sticking out of Elrohir's pocket. 

"What's this then? Baby's first Das Kapital?" 

Elrohir, too young to understand the joke, pulls out the book to show him. "Elrond's book, see? He wrote this all himself, look."

Maedhros grits his teeth, flicks through the book perfunctorily. "Oh, very nice." 

"See again, the last page! He's drawn our house," Elrohir takes the book and holds it open. "See?" 

Maedhros glances at the page carelessly, and then the one next to it. He blinks. Feels something very small and very far inside him break. Elrohir's hand is covering the photo, but he knows what it is. He should take the boy back to Maglor. He shouldn't look at the photo. 

“Can Maedhros-uncle keep this?” he asks Elrohir quietly, smiling as the boy cheerfully agrees, mainly because Elrond had brought about twenty or so copies, even though they were all the same book and even though he knew both boys treated reading like one would treat a rash. His smile is as beautiful as it tends to be at his most self-destructive. "Thank you, Elrohir." 

"You're welcome, Maedhros-uncle, and can I tell Elrond you like his book? He'll be happy." 

He inhales sharply, shakes his head no. "No, no. It's OK. No need, Elrohir, don't worry."

"You'll tell him yourself?" Elrohir turns to look at Elladan, who's cheerful again and giving a remarkably forgiving wave to his uncle, and runs over. Maedhros tries his best to not meet Maglor’s eye as he comes over to collect his bag from where he's left it.

"Khuda-hafiz," Maglor mutters, curt. Maedhros repeats the farewell, looking straight at his own knees where he'd swiftly hidden the book. 

He's home alone when he takes the book out of his pocket, Fingon at a Party meeting. Maedhros should be there too, he knows he should, the elections close enough to touch, but his heart is rolling wildly within him and he's sitting at his desk under the light of a single oil lamp. The damned dead mouse under the floorboard that Fingon couldn't find announces its presence, the rotting floor under his feet evidence of its existence. 

Maedhros takes the book out, bypasses the smiling portrait of Elrond, flips past the drawings until he gets to the child on the back cover, eye-to-eye. His granddaughter. He shuts it with a snap. The rotting floorboard creaks and groans beneath him like it's breathing, until the sound has lulled him into the closest state to normalcy that he can manage. He opens it again, and there she is and Maedhros is suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of his isolation, like someone screaming in a crowd. 

He twitches, kicks at the floor, tries not to look at the child's grinning face. His slipper slides on the rot. He's asked Fingon a thousand times to pry open the damn floorboard but every single time Fingon finds nothing. Perhaps the floorboard is destined to go. To continue to fester, to infect whatever lived within him with a rot preordained to one day envelop him. 

He shouldn't have fought with Maglor. 

The two of them are the only ones left now, the last remnants of a time where hate was rife and hope was plentiful. Most of the rest of them are gone, so many killed off one by one like a tremendous carcass picked at by vultures. There are only bones left. That’s what they are, he and his brothers. Elrond and Elros too, in a way — all of them bones frozen in their clifftop morgue. Elrond has drawn it, rather nicely, actually, opposite the photo of his daughter, but Maedhros has no time for drawings. Elrond's rather-nice drawing is, after all, just another carcass, just another heap of bones propped up against each other in a mummery of the life it once sustained. 

Maedhros looks at his granddaughter again. He's spoken to her twenty eight times across her life. All on the phone. His chair creaks again, sinks into the rot. The smell rises all around him. 

Elrond had called them one evening, too heartsick to wait for the letter to arrive, and he had choked out into the phone that his daughter was dead and Maedhros remembers how Maglor had dropped his glass on the floor and how it seemed to take a very long time to shatter. He’d waved his brother out because it had been a very long time since Maedhros was good at things like comfort, and kind words, and Elrond. He’d sat outside and then Maglor had told him and then the two of them had grieved, of course they had. It was their grandchild, albeit one they’d never really seen. 

But that grief was nothing. That grief didn’t hold a candle to the day, three weeks after that phone call when Maedhros had opened an English newspaper laid out for free at the Indian Coffee House and came face to face with his granddaughter. 

Maedhros bends over to open his bottom drawer, takes out the newspaper, grown soft now, touched at the edges by the rot in the floorboards, the black mould climbing up his writing desk. Flattens it out and then flattens the book out beside it. 

In order to satisfy the public perception that good people never have bad things happen to them, Arwen had to be made into a caricature of depravity. Essentially, they had to whip her with words before they could whip her with anything else, like tenderising meat before marinating it. Maedhros knew the process better than most. It was a declaration of ownership more than anything else, this whipping. You’d not break into someone else’s house and marinate their mutton. Maedhros knew that. They'd done it to him, with the photo of him taken at the ratheeb, wild-eyed and exotic and terrifying. 

In the newspaper photograph, grainy as it is, Arwen has a fist in the air and a grin tucked into her dimple. They had printed her next to an article she’d written about the statue she wished to pull down. He looks at the photo in the book, and the photo in the newspaper. Elrond’s little limerick about “there once was a girl named Arwen” is typed out neatly in the book, right above an anecdote about her trying to save a badger set. 

And in the newspaper, big black letters right beside her face: TEEN TERRORIST TORCHES HALL. Maedhros looks at the headline he's read a thousand times over. He slots the picture-book into the newspaper, folds his arms over them both, and places his head in them, forehead pressed to the newsprint. As always when at his desk, the smell of rot rises all around him, creating tidal waves in his stomach that he breathes slowly through. Fingon never could find the mouse, he thinks, eyes burning even as the lamp snuffs itself out. 

Maybe there's no mouse under the floorboards. Maybe there was never a mouse in the first place. Maybe the rot is him.

Chapter Text

In the sixties and seventies, the political theatre of Kerala consisted of two primary stages: talking and thrashing. This was the kind of teamwork that appealed to the father-son duo of Maedhros and Elros — the latter a handsome, silver-tongued demagogue with an advanced degree in political theory, and the former a six-foot-four powerhouse with a millimetre-long fuse, kilometre-long rap sheet and an advanced degree in battering people he didn’t like. 

As such, Comrade Elros was elected to his post for his outstanding campaign speeches, tireless constituency work and passionate radio broadcasts across the district. His foster father was elected because the last time a religious fundamentalist attempted to organise a communal riot in Kozhikode, he knocked on his door, politely introduced himself, and then dutifully delivered such a remarkable beating that it was said Cochin Medical School sent in a busload of students to study said fundamentalist’s recovery, because the thrashing had broken bones most people hadn’t actually heard of. 

It is that specific personality trait of his brother that Celegorm sets a running commentary about as he reluctantly takes Elrond to the masjid hall where the ratheeb is performed, primarily to dissuade the latter from turning up at the Party office and demanding to see Maedhros, an act that would certainly involve Celegorm's kneecaps being shattered in record time. 

"Now, these days the ratheeb has a screen put up, as it has… hm, more visitors, let us just say, so you must stay behind it — the screen is put up so those doing the ritual can't see the audience, and if he sees you, I am dead, understand?" he instructs his nephew strictly, having explained that he'd have to remain outside as dogs are obviously not permitted in the masjid. And so Elrond steps inside alone, surrounded by a gaggle of tourists — when he was younger, there hadn’t been a single one. Before they go up to the platform, someone collects a fee - three rupees. That too, he realises, is new. 

Maedhros had taken part in the ratheeb regularly as Elrond and Elros had grown up, once every few months, the self-flagellation ritual as commonplace to them as having their teeth cleaned. The ratheeb, short for kuthu ratheeb, ‘stabbing ritual’, is aptly named. An incredibly localised regional-cultural folk art, the kuthu ratheeb is practiced by select Muslim communities in North Kerala, such as Kozhikode, or Lakshwadeep. Relatively similar to religious trance rituals as practiced in the West by certain Catholic sects and the symbolic flogging routine as practiced by Shia Muslims, the kuthu ratheeb turns the act of self-flagellation into an art form. 

Simply put, the practitioners work themselves up into a trance-state or frenzy, and strike themselves on the chest and back with ornamental knives and swords, following the rhythm of the duffu, drums, and ritualistic chanting or singing, increasing and decreasing the intensity of their strikes based on the tightening of drumbeats and verses. For a practice so rooted in the religious, the vast majority of practitioners in Kozhikode were, in fact, everything from secularists to downright atheists, the appeal of the ratheeb, as opposed to other religious flagellation rituals, being the theatricality of it. Maedhros had taken up the practice at the age of fourteen, feeling too wild and queer for his own body, and had never laid the swords down since. 

He used to take Elrond and Elros out to the beach (Maglor having neither stomach nor particular appreciation for the ratheeb) at sunrise as he immersed himself in the Arabian Sea, and then take them with him to watch the performance. They would often be one of only a handful of gazers – the ratheeb, in Kozhikode, was after all somewhat commonplace, and the only people who cared enough to come and watch would be friends and family, and occasionally, people from the next town over. So the twins would sit cross-legged on one of the viewing platforms and look down as the ratheeb began with a slow, repetitive devotional, before the drumbeats began to increase. 

Maedhros once described the trance as "the knowledge that there is a precipice combined with the desire to keep running", and it had never really made sense as an explanation, but that had been how he saw it. The twins would watch happily as Maedhros spun around like a whirling dervish, striking at himself, doing twice as much with a single hand, eyes wide and wild, graceful in the way tiger-stalking and lion-leaping is graceful, and he never, ever seemed to feel the pain of it, lost as he is in himself. Waist-high Elrond and Elros, with the small boy's appreciation for well-performed bloodshed, used to go around the viewing platform and proudly tell everyone, one-by-one, 'look, that's my Baba' and 'see, that's my father, that one, do you see?', and even though they all already knew, they would indulge the boys — who looked so different from both fathers — let them have that little moment of connection. 

Today, however, the woman beside Elrond is American, blonde, her camera the same make as his. Lindsay, she tells him her name, and then shudders for a second. I’m so excited, aren’t you excited? Elrond shakes his head, and Lindsay looks at him like he has grown a second one. Everyone around him, he realises coldly, is a foreigner. 

Look at that one, Lindsay marvels, and there he is. The glare of the sun on henna-red hair, twisting wildly out of a loose tie because it had always refused to succumb to anything from greying to combing. Elrond cannot look right at him. He turns, wincing. 

 Frightening, isn't he? asks Lindsay, shuddering slightly. Yet so beautiful. 

That’s my father, Elrond wants to tell her. That’s the man who would creep out to the porch on nights when the stars hid their faces, and tell me to count his heartbeats as I slept. That was how I learned my numbers in three languages, half-asleep and counting along. When I twisted my ankle he sat up all night with two glass bottles, one filled with hot water and one filled with ice, and rolled them alternatingly across my leg till the swelling went away. 

The tablas are faster now, the flagellants' feet kick higher and higher and the cameras click faster and faster. Lindsay looks like she’s enjoying it at last, not because the violence has abated but because the men have finally begun to bleed. And then the music quietens, the first of many breathing pauses, where the flagellants could take a few steps back from the precipice. Elrond raises his camera, tries to get the platform in focus. Maedhros walks in a circle as is customary for him and runs a careless, disdaining eye across the viewing platform — though he cannot actually see any of the audience, he knows they are there. He can guess what they look like. He glares at them with hard, blazing apathy turning his face to stone. 

Elrond, who has an anxious stomach at the best of times, feels a sudden surge of what he can only describe as sea-sickness. He lowers the camera, does an about-turn, and flees without another word, pushing past the three-deep crowd of fellow (no, no, not fellow, never fellow, he tells himself) tourists, runs out of the masjid compound entirely and leans against a tree, trying to regulate his breathing and tamp down the inexplicable nausea. 

What is it?

What is it that has him out here, panicking silently? Elrond knows full well he had not been afraid. There are worse evils than self-flagellation, he remembers saying to Cel, a very long time ago. The blood, the frenzy, the trance, it doesn’t bother him, it has never bothered him. Nothing happened, he tells himself. Nothing happened, I was not afraid. He thinks of how his Baba’s eyes had looked like rough stone, how they passed over him like he was just another tourist peering through a camera. Like he was just another surveyor of sorrow, there to extract all he could. He had feared Maedhros’ wrath, his justified anger at his absconding son, and above all else he had feared his sorrow, his grief. He had not realised that a parent's disregard is the most painful of them all. That's all this is, at the end of the day. He was simply ill-prepared. A tourist without charcoal tablets and bottled water. 

How is he supposed to deal with this too, atop all else?

The rivers have dried and the sea is hushed and the stones have eroded into shapes Elrond can no longer recognise and his daughter is dead. The weight of this new understanding floods into him, the knowledge that he, Elrond, has also changed in the eyes of those who view him, that nobody who looks at him now will think, ah, yes, Comrade Maedhros’ boy. If he were anyone else it would have been homesickness, a desire to leave this old-new place and swap it for what he knows. But because Elrond is Elrond, there is no true name for what had surged in him at the hall, rising too high, forcing him to retreat to whatever frail boundary his mind had constructed at speed. 

“Ten minutes!” Celegorm scolds him, scampering over to him with Chairman Mao at his heels. “Ten minutes only you stayed! Is that all you wanted to see of your father?”

“Sorry,” Elrond winces, shaking his head. “I felt like I was going to be sick, I had to get out.”

“If you’re sick, you go to the doctor, not go watch men beat themselves with knives,” Celegorm explains slowly, as if his nephew had only just got off another planet, cosmically jetlagged. “Do you not have doctors in England? Hai rabba, civilised country they call it. Do you people have toothpaste? What about imodium syrup? Have you heard of that?” 

Elrond cannot help but snort, remembering the first time Elros had walked into the bathroom after being returned to Devon, and ran straight back out, his face all pink and screwed up. You are all revolting, horrible people, I don’t know what sort of jungle you live in that you resort to such barbaric practices, I can’t bear it, you disgusting woman, he had gagged, and then stormed out and Elwing had cried because, frankly, wouldn’t you have done the same? 

Elrond had hovered awkwardly, feeling bad enough for his mother that he didn’t follow Elros out of the door, but — having not spoken to her in fifteen years — did not feel comfortable enough to explain that it was less that Elros was specifically calling her a “disgusting woman” and more that he was referring to the neat rolls of toilet paper stacked next to the commode. For as much as he sympathised with the too-young woman who let go of her twins in a split-second crowd-crush, his empathy simply did not extend to a detailed explanation of the arse-washing practices in the Global South. 

“Ten minutes,” Celegorm groans again. “When your Baba finds out I took you there, he will certainly break bones that I don’t even have, and it will all be for ten minutes. How can you live with yourself? This sweet creature —“ here he points at the growling Chairman — “will now be an orphan, all because of you.”

Elrond, not wanting to go into the parentage of Celegorm's monstrous Alsatian and frankly wanting to forget that it exists, brings the subject back to the ratheeb: "why are there… tourists, Celegorm-uncle? The screen, the raised platform – they weren't there before. Same with the entrance charges. Is this a new practice?"

Celegorm's face hardens dangerously this time, and Elrond remembers why the man was — as eccentric and irritating as he is — on the Party's payroll. "What do you think?" Celegorm asks brusquely. "You think it was their choice?" 

"No, I assumed it wasn't. Whose choice was it?" 

"Yours, boy, yours," snaps his uncle, and again Elrond feels the same untethered panic rise in him, the loss-and-lost that swelled up when Maedhros cast a dismissive eye up at the unseen audience. 

"Mine?" 

Celegrom sighs, shakes his head apologetically. "Sorry, Elrond. I didn't mean to take it out on you. Of course not you, just…" 

"I know, uncle." 

Celegorm shakes his head again, looking back at the masjid. “They’ve started charging people for entry, if you noticed. Demand has risen, you see, and Kerala these days thrives on tourism. Demand and supply, no matter how many red-salutes we paint on our walls.”

“I did notice,” nods Elrond. “It’s… it’s a product. Unsanitised, because they… I see. But Maedhros was never like that. He wouldn’t have agreed to become a spectacle, not for, not for tourists. He had such… disdain for that sort of thing, called even Abba a performing monkey sometimes, even if as a joke.”

“They’ve started paying the practitioners too,” says Celegorm flatly, and then offers nothing more at all. 

Elrond understands. The ratheeb had never been about religion to Comrade Maedhros, but rather an articulation of pain. In the Raj, some languages taken away and others force-fed, this had been the way his father spoke, just like how Maglor spoke through the sitar. When Maedhros entered a trance state and whipped himself bloody, he hadn't been praying, he'd been speaking, and those in the room with him — even them, only four or five — had understood. It had been an articulation of humanity, a hand-on-the-heart from the leg-breaker, bomb-thrower, the terrorist, an acknowledgement that he too could bleed. It had always been where Baba looked the most at peace, the most human, the time his eyes were gentlest — aside from the starless nights. 

His eyes were gentlest then, truly. They said look at me, please. They said look at me, see me. Don’t watch me, please, see me. Understand me in my violence, my anger, my sorrow, my joy. They asked can you do such a thing? Can you love me, even so? 

When Maedhros was sent off to prison, the Times printed a photo of him, mid-ratheeb. Elrond remembers coming across it, and he remembers just as well how he hadn't recognised the man in the frame. The enormity of all he was saying frozen into a tight, greyscale box, blood black on his bare back, glaring. He's beautiful, he remembers a woman saying, and to this day he remembers how she shuddered. Oh, how monstrous. How beautiful and monstrous he looks. Later in his life, most people would assume Elrond had seen the makings of a terrorist all across his upbringing, growing up in the cliff-house. But the truth is that Elrond only learned what made a terrorist on the day he looked at the Times and felt a frightened woman's shudder at the exotic and erotic spectacle they had made of his father. 

And now they sell tickets to it. To leer and point and misunderstand. They flock to the masjid to watch his father perform the ratheeb, pay twenty rupees for the privilege. For that had been the other reason they picked the photo of him at the ratheeb, half-clad and furious, to accompany his terrorism charge: because of how terribly wonderful he looked in it. In that photograph, he is whatever the tourists and newspaper-readers wanted him to be. He is tropical. Cricket and chicken vindaloo. He is eyeliner, the sculpted face of a Sufi saint, the gentle, despairing eyes of a starving camel. He looks at the reader with come-hither eyes, begs them to whip his religion out of him. He is monster, terrorist, deviant, divine. They say he fucks men. Did you know that? Did you know that about Elrond's father? Maedhros is adorned and embalmed, barbaric and beautiful. He is whichever figurine foreign imaginations need in the moment, to shudder at then, and touch themselves to later. 

They have eaten my father, Elrond thinks desperately. Oh Baba, they have swallowed you whole.

Elrond knows, growing up in Kozhikode, how a people’s folklore, their art, their culture, carries their way into the world, becoming the roads they take to the centre. To alienate a people from their culture is to deprive them the ability to connect, to deprive them of access to community. The ratheeb was just another small dirt path along which Maedhros and his peers could feel tethered to the earth, and here it is now, widened, tolls built across the middle and set to tarmac for the world to eat. For Elrond to eat. 

He itches for a fight all day, wanting to project the skin-crawling nameless seasickness and anger, and so when Maglor arrives home that evening, Elrond confronts him immediately. He does so because if he doesn’t, then they’ll have to play the game that all languages in India play, that endless, dizzying relay of questions that very swiftly dives into pointlessness if you don’t watch out. Elrond is tired and he is out of practice with using question marks to greet and hold space and fill gaps and pretend to care and try to listen. 

"Why does Maedhros not wish to see me?" he demands. “Why have you all been lying to me all these weeks? I don’t give a shit about your excuses. I saw him at the ratheeb. Why have you been lying? Did he tell you to do this?”

“Does it matter?” Maglor asks him in turn. “Does knowing that he does not wish to see you make a difference to your life? As in — a difference from the past twenty six years.”

“So it’s my fault?”

“Did I say that?” Maglor’s voice is colder than he had ever heard it. “I asked what is it to you?”

Elrond cannot lie to Maglor. He never quite could. 

“It hurts me, Abba,” he shakes his head, lips taut, and then the words tumble out in a flood. “To know that… to know it is so easy for him to put away his love for me. That the moment Elros returned and I did not, it was over. That he and I were over, though it was… I have never known a father but the two of you. Mum tried, she did, but she was twenty when she had us. Thirty seven when we returned, and she had to try so hard to be a mother and still… there was no time for her to be a father too. You both were all I knew, no matter where I was. No matter what I was doing. I am only hurt that it was so easy for him to pack it away.”

Maglor nods, and his face is only sterner now, uncharacteristically harsh score-marks digging into the corners of his mouth. He knows his brother’s faults like the lines on his palm, Maedhros’ rashness, his split-second turns to violence, his bitterness and anger and self-flagellation, that there is no world in which the Raj occupied India and Fëanor died as he did, where Maedhros Fëanorian could ever be a good person. Equally, he knows that his son is wrong. It is not only good people who are capable of love. 

“You are under the impression, is it, that your Baba stopped loving you because you did not return like Elros did?” he asks coolly. “Is that your opinion?” 

“Don’t patronise me,” Elrond snaps, temper rising again. “All of you keeping up this horseshite charade that he’s here, there, everywhere else. Not just now. For all this time, for the last… for all the time I’ve been gone. Remember the phone calls? He’d talk to me on the phone for what? Ten-fifteen minutes each time. He spoke more to Arwen. Arwen, who he’d never even met! Of course he’s packed away his love. Of course he has. I only wish you’d bothered to tell me.”

“And you are better than him?”

“No, I never said that! I never said I was better than him, I could have called more, yes, I should have visited, I know, but so could he! Elros came to England every year, and you spoke to me on the phone every fortnight but Maedhros could ha —“

“Your Baba could come to England, hm?” Maglor’s face moves from stern to furious, his lips tightening. “And they’ll have what, welcomed him with open arms? Your Baba and his terrorism charge could have hopped on a plane any time, na? It’s as easy for him as it is for Elros, is it?” 

Elrond flushes a deep, ashamed scarlet. “I just — I just meant it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that you all act as though I hate him too. I — I thought of him each night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would! And I’d think of him when I was afraid, or stressed, or —“

“Like a djinn?” Maglor’s eyes flash in the darkness. “To be summoned at will and dismissed according to your need?” 

Elrond turns away. Maglor turns back to go inside and his son thinks is that it? What do I do now? Do I return? Where? but before the questions grow points his father is back, the hard look still on his face. He has a small, wooden chest in his hands that he shoves at Elrond. 

“Open it,” he orders roughly. “The key is in the lock. Open the box.” 

Elrond does. 

“Gold?” he whispers, frowning. "What is this?" 

Gold it is, and loved too. There are two heavy bangles, darkened slightly by age, and a thick necklace — almost a chain, in the old fashion of the twenties. These lie at the bottom of the chest, and over them are strewn newer pieces, earrings, bracelets, a thin choker in the fashion of the preceding year. Elrond runs his fingers across a pair of earrings shaped like an eight-pointed star — a supernova, Maedhros had once told them. A supernova sends light here, there, everywhere, and explodes every which way. A star bursting open and showering the world with light. Now, you still think your science book is boring, hm? 

He blinks the glaze of gold from his eyes, moving to stand at the edge of the porch, the toe of his boots hanging over the rain gutter. The wind has picked up. It blows straight through his shirt, into his bones, rattling in his empty spaces. He feels like something shaking the bars of a cage, frothing at the mouth. Maglor steps up to stand beside him, unavoidable and furious. 

“What is this?” Elrond’s voice is hoarse with wonder even as it is hushed. “This… there’s so much here. And so much is new. And then these old pieces at the bottom. You have kept these for very long.”

“The old pieces are our mother’s,” Maglor takes the box from him, smiling now as he runs a finger across the heavy bangles, as if the glow from them has drained all his fury. “She used to let us wear them sometimes — when Abba was not looking, of course. She used to say, well, I have seven boys, it’s not like I will live to see a daughter wear these… or even a daughter in law, I realise now, considering the woman Curufin married would strangle someone with a chain before wearing it.”

Maglor laughs aloud, slipping one of the bangles onto his wrist: “Caranthir used to have a little joke that Ammi letting us wear her jewelry is why Maedhros-ikka is, well, the way he is — with men. Of course, he stopped after your Baba heard this joke and, very memorably, gave him a wonderful black-eye and knocked his favourite tooth out because Caranthir was the kind of person who had a favourite tooth.”

“I see what made Caranthir-uncle go and join the Naxalites then,” snorts Elrond, his own anger draining, though slower. “Get to the point, Abba. God, these are some beautiful pieces.” 

“Yes, your Baba used to stand outside Party meetings and try to talk like a normal person, you know, someone that doesn’t treat knocking out his brother’s favourite tooth as an achievement. The problem is, as Ammi said, there’s not exactly many women in the family, so we had to get the Women’s Politburo members to help us choose the new fashions, you see. And every year we would add something. Little by little only, but for fifteen years, every year we added something.” 

“What FOR?” Elrond exclaims all of a sudden, heat rising in his cheeks again. Perhaps this is him becoming his father’s son, he thinks recklessly. Perhaps he too should go to the masjid and beat himself bloody for pennies. “This morning I see that B— Maedhros is turning his ratheeb into tourist attractions to put a roof over this house, you yourself have begun bringing a collection tin to Friday performances here at the Library. You have commodified yourselves, comrades! Look at this bracelet! Solid gold, Abba! The study room has a leak in the roof and the well doesn’t have a motor and the dining furniture is the same as it was when I left! And still you both burned the money order I sent, and refused all other help. All this for what? Living like this for what? To add to your storage of gold? This could — those boys need a proper education — why would you both —“

“You know why, Elrond,” Maglor’s voice is thin now, no longer rising to match his, he sounds old. “Fifteen years. You know why.” 

“No, no, I don’t understand! Of course I don’t bloody understand —“

“Then why, Elrond, do you look as if your heart is breaking?” Maglor asks softly, bringing a hand up to the other’s face. He hadn’t realised. Elrond turns away, moves aside, breathing deeply and trying his very best not to cry. Maglor doesn’t follow this time, and he’s grateful for that at least. 

He knows. Of course he knows. Elrond doesn’t know what he is now, doesn’t know what shape all the things inside him have turned into now, how they fit around the empty spaces within him anymore. But he was a son of this red earth once, a son of this house, of Kerala, raised on the cliff-edge of the subcontinent. Of course he knows why his fathers had spent fifteen years scrimping and saving to put money aside, why they bought a small gold piece every year and put it into this chest. It’s what every house in the neighbourhood does. Every house in the district, every house in the state. 

It’s a practice Elrond once stood in The Red Lion and called “endearingly patriarchal”, a throwaway mention in some of his old lectures. It’s a practice Arwen would have been frankly rather horrified at but as Elrond stands here, his father by his side holding an old, beloved box of heirlooms and new gold, he cannot stop the sorrow from rising in him silently, at even the thought of it. Not sorrow for Arwen, no, this isn’t familiar, sharp and tearing grief, this isn’t like standing in line at the butcher and sobbing over toad-in-the-hole, not even sorrow for his fathers — this is older, quieter, something deep in the ground beneath his feet, this is a loss he no longer has any words to name. 

“Your Baba started it, you know,” Maglor is speaking again, a small smile in his voice, sitting on the porch platform and pulling Elrond down to sit by him. “Can you believe that? Comrade Maedhros, revolutionary leader who made the district CPIM branch what it is today, fervent devotee of Marx and Engels. On the day you called home and said you adopted that little girl. It was him only.”

“ELROS!” he had roared, and Elros had stumbled down the stairs, half awake and half dressed because Elros had an extremely revolutionary habit of lying in until mid-afternoon on Saturdays. “Elros, you lazy dog! Get down here!”

“Baba for god’s sake, they can hear you in Kovalam, have you heard of not turning every sentence into a bloody declaration? I am asleep!” he’d complained, and Maedhros hadn’t given a damn, rapping on Maglor’s bedroom door as if there was an air raid signal. 

“Salaam alaikyum, Maglor, get the hell out of bed!” he called out, waiting impatiently for Maglor to open the door, muttering darkly about reprobates who used salaam alaikyum and hell in the same sentence. 

“Elrond sent a telegram!” cried Maedhros, outright grinning. Elros blinked, having never seen such an expression on his father’s countenance, especially when it came to matters involving the prodigal Elrond, and frankly somewhat frightened by the unnatural contortions of his face. “He adopted her! Arwen!” 

“Mashallah,” breathed Maglor, tears in his eyes. He pressed a hand to his chest, smiling. “Such a sweet girl she is, do you remember how politely she spoke with us on the phone? Oh, such wonderful news!”

“You’re not telling me you didn’t know?” Elros smirked. “I knew weeks ago!”

“Elros, I will do both of us a favour and not skin you alive for not telling us if in the next ten minutes you go out to Ahmed-ikka and tell him to get cooking. Mutton-biryani, porotta, the works, go!” Maedhros snapped his fingers. “For around three hundred people, no, make it four hundred! Then go to the Party office and invite everyone to our place tomorrow, then head to Finrod’s place and give a formal invite to the opposition, and say I expect to see them all there.”

“The election is next month, Maedhros,” Maglor pointed out. “Absolutely no chance the opposition are going to show up to this. It’s you, ikka. Last election you went and thrashed Dior for daring to look at you wrong. Believe me, they’ll probably think you plan to do a mass poisoning.”

“Oh, yes, you’re right,” Maedhros nodded, before turning back to Elros. “Tell Finrod if he and his people don’t turn up, I’ll break their legs next time I see them, and personally see to it that Dior’s days are numbered. Oh, then stop at the post office and send a telegram to Caranthir and his jungle people, and tell him I’ll break more than his legs if I don’t see him.”

Elros choked back a snort: “and should I send a telegram to Delhi and invite Prime Minister Nehru also? Maybe one to America, President Nixon will be feeling left out, no?” 

“Do you also not like having legs?” Maedhros asked testily. “Do you prefer I break them at the knees or ankles?” 

“I wonder why anyone from the opposition would ever be wary about your party invitations, Maedhros,” muttered Maglor. “Such a sweet, non-violent soul you are. Gandhi himself looks like a warlord next to you.” 

“What did I tell you about uttering that skinny bastard’s name under my roof, Maglor?”

“Well, technically, the girl is adopted…” Elros pointed out, only for Maedhros to flick his ear.

“So what? You think I lay on my back howling as I myself personally gave birth to a donkey like you? Technically this, technically that, the worst mistake anyone ever made was sending you to college. Now, up, get dressed — and go do what I say! And tell Ahmed-ikka that if he skimps on the mutton, I will tie him to a tree, break his legs, fatten him up, then sacrifice him in place of the goat next Bakr-eid. No expenses spared for my granddaughter!” 

It needs to be said at this point, that Maedhros Fëanorian approached joy, disaster, birth, death, adoption and taxes with the exact same attitude: gleeful violence. The three leg-breaking threats in one breath comforted Elros with the knowledge that his father was not, in fact, going to die from his body rejecting the unnatural display of open sentimentality, so he sped off, grabbing said father’s purse on the way because he was simply not going to pay for four hundred servings of mutton biryani. Maedhros had then turned to Maglor, with an air of a cat who — after polishing off a large rat — set its sights on the mouse it had saved for dessert. 

“Go get Ammi’s jewelry box,” he demanded and Maglor, chuckling, hastened to obey. Maedhros peered into the box, wrinkling his nose. 

“Sometimes I forget that Abba was also a Communist…” he muttered dolefully, pulling out the thick, unfashionable gold chain, which poor Fëanor had crafted with his own hands. “A girl who lives in England won’t wear such things for her nikkah, Maglor!”

“She is four years old, brother, calm down,” Maglor snorted. “We can add to it, can’t we? These English girls only marry in their twenties, we have time.” 

And that is what they did, the two of them. Sometimes Elros, or Celegorm, or one of the other brothers might drop in something small but mostly, year after year, it had been Maedhros and Maglor, doing what every grandparent in the state did. Patriarchal, certainly, slightly feudal even. But it is what it is. Love speaks through a carefully maintained strongbox of collected gold, the chest rattling in Elrond's shaking hands, the warm heart of the cliffside house. He can't speak. What can he say? 

“We didn’t tell him for that first year,” Maglor tells Elrond now, dully. “That you were taken away from us because he received his sentence. Not a word. It was Fingon’s idea – and he was right, I still think. That it would have made him act out in prison, made him reckless, he would not have wished to live, so Fingon and I told him you both weren’t allowed to visit, because you were under eighteen.”

“But we were eighteen the year after.”

“And that’s when he found out,” Maglor exhales shakily, rubbing his eyes. “I told him. Fingon could not bear it. And I tried to say it was because your mother wanted you back, that it was nothing to do with him but the moment I said it, he knew. I had never seen him like that, Elrond. Not once, not even when our father died before his eyes. But when he found out you were both sent back because of his charges… I have never seen him like that. Never. It destroyed something in him, something that to this day has not come back, not even when Elros returned. I watched that part of him die.” 

“You say he did not speak much to you on the phone,” he continues. “He may not have, no. But each year he would ask me or Elros, will Elrond be coming for Eid? My brother, who would jump into a canal and turn into a fish before fasting for even a single day of Ramzan would ask religiously, every year. Will he be coming? Have you invited his family too? Tell them there’s plenty of room here, tell them I’ll make Elros sleep in a tree if Arwen wants a second room to keep her toys.”

Elrond buries his face in his hands. 

“I’m not showing you this box and telling you these stories to hurt you, Elrond. You know that, don’t you?” Maglor puts a hand on his shoulder. “I am only telling you so you know how much he loves you.”

“I wish I had,” Elrond speaks into his fingers. “I wish I had come. I — I should have.”

“But you did not,” says Maglor. There’s not a shred of accusation in his voice, not even mild disapproval. His Abba has always been like this. Maglor has always been the kind of person who would sign off on any choice his children made, simply because he would never choose differently for them what they chose for themselves. There’s no animosity in the statement, only a tired acceptance. 

Elrond wants to answer, wants to make the usual noises. His life, his work, his family, his writing. But all those threads of his life unwound from the same spool — this house, atop this seaside cliff. His brother. Abba. Baba. The excuses don’t come, but his eyes burn again with sudden, shameful sorrow that he cannot wrestle back this time. Maglor looks over at him, clucks in sympathy. 

“Oh Elrond, come,” he croons, pulling his son close. “I’m sorry. Come here. Don’t cry. I did not mean to speak so harshly.”

“I wanted to return,” Elrond cannot help the words escaping in a hitching whimper. “I did. Every day. But I wanted to keep you all as you were. Like if I — like if I kept you there, those last few weeks wouldn't have happened. I'm sorry. I wanted to. I did." 

Maglor doesn’t offer a forgiveness that was not his to give, but neither does he let the guilt go unacknowledged. He pulls Elrond closer, kisses his temple. “I know. I know you did. I didn’t wish to hurt you so. I only wished for you to know how much he loves you.” 

“I’m sorry, Abba. I’m really, really sorry.”

“He loves you. Nobody can love anybody more than he loves you," he smooths his son's hair back, holds on tighter. He's out of practice, too-used to comforting children, other twins, not even waist-high but Elrond has been starving for decades. He takes what he gets, and Maglor gives it freely. Runs his fingers through Elrond's hair again, unconsciously picks out a tangle. "Don’t cry so. Come, dry your tears. They'll break his heart. He loves you. Your Baba loves you.” 

No river is infinite. They are only as enduring as our care, only as alive as our love.

Elrond understands now why his father had wept that day, watching that muddy old river die. He understands it isn’t so much the unraveling itself that brings sorrow, but the memory of the spool. Maedhros had fought tooth and nail to free his people, then came face to face to what they had become, the frayed edges turning it into something unrecognisable. The forests turning to brittle skeletons, the dams squeezing shut the rivers’ throats, the slow, torturous evisceration of his beloved homeland, propelled forward into terminal velocity even after the Raj had left. Two hundred years of rot cannot be excoriated in a day. Maedhros watched his country slowly unravel until one day it turned to him and called him a terrorist for the very thing it had once thanked him for. 

And it’s the same with me, realises Elrond. He had tried to tell me too, that day by the river. 

Maedhros had tried to tell him how shores and riverbanks shift and die, that nothing in a country touched by rot could ever stay the same. Perhaps Maedhros had known even then, that he would one day end up performing his pain for men and women who liked seeing people who looked like him suffer. He had told him about the shrinking of sand dunes and the cliff-pieces washed out to sea and the weakening pull of waves but he had been too young and too cocksure to believe it.  

He had been so sure then, nursed a fervent belief in the permanence of beloved things, held a fundamental faith in his father’s strength. Sure enough to stay silent for twenty-five years, faithful enough to fall asleep to Maedhros’ heartbeat every night of his life. 

Did you know that, Baba? I used to think you did. I realise now that you didn’t. Because I didn’t tell you.

If only I told you. If only I had come for Eid. 

“I must compose for the coming Friday, Elrond,” Maglor breaks the silence at last, pulling away gently. “I’ll go in now. Unless you wish for me to sit here with you. If you want that, then I will do that.”

“Can you compose out here?” asks Elrond quietly, wiping his eyes. He takes a deep, cleansing breath, and tries to smile. “Only if you can, of course. If not, it’s all right. I won't drop dead.”

Maglor doesn’t answer, only kisses the top of his head again and runs a hand through the long dark strands, like they were just another set of sitar strings. He doesn’t say a word as he heads inside and fetches his instruments, a quick re-initialising and re-tuning, a few twangs to remember the things that tether him. And then no longer does Maglor need think in prose: like the ratheeb, this too is an articulation by those made disarticulate, a strangled burst of feeling. 

I wonder which organs you miss, you who wreak starvation, you, the rotting corpse of a century. Art thou lungless or heartless? O vultures of Kolkata, those burning flame-haired twins into a soot-black train, are you proud? 

O you boot-polishers of the Boer, luggage-porters of Empire, blood-moppers of the Soviet, tax-secretaries of Theresienstadt, news-readers of the Congo, scruple-eaters, conscience-wipers, General Dyer’s barbers, the purposeless, the bileless, child-stealers, pain-drinkers, bone-drummers, tank-cleaners, book-burners. The heart-gutters, law-changers, clever-clogs, wasp-fuckers, mob-stirrers, coffin-breeders. O you devils, dry-eyed by denial, that kept this world on its toes, heedless of the left-behind, may such decaying dirges disgust you.

It’s what he enjoys most about practicing, as opposed to performing, like how his brother enjoys the trance and frenzy of the ratheeb. It isn’t just the interiority of it but rather the intimacy of playing to one or none, the songs being for oneself or one other, rather than turning into a dishcloth to sop up applause and derision, rather than turning into a way to put a leaking roof over their heads. 

There is only him and Elrond, who once used a landslide as a waterslide, earthy mud slick all over khaki shorts, in whom lived all the quietest, tenderest parts of Maglor’s sharp-eyed, strong-willed brother. Elrond, whose most piercing words are soft, who coupled naivete with confidence, whose pain breaks so easily into tears, whose chubby-barefoot baby-footsteps decided the course of their lives. 

Let this seasalt cliff drift across the water and be not a grave but an island. Let my moonlit children see their first dawn, and let stone hearts turn flesh. Let the world turn back and forth and find its place and let our dead turn coffins into rowboats. 

For not all that ages is rot, and upon this seasalt cliff, four cheery ghosts play the past as present, run timeless games on grassy hills. They nibble cautiously on bitter red sod and love and live like the cliff never stops. Let them live kinder, beloved souls born for each other, if only here, if only under this canvas sky pinned to dawn by skylark-song. 

Maglor continues to play and Elrond leans on the pillar, eyes closing. The ustad — the music master — puts together stanzas, quintets, grabbing words and notes from the air as though they were the little striped mosquitoes, those hits-and-misses of dengue and malaria, and transfigures their discordant buzzing into love and grief and amazement and delight; turns the Library of Imladris into a house of song. 

But know, reader, not all houses have names. 

One such un-named house rests only ten minutes away, halfway down the cliff, and here, Fingon is holding a pot of turmeric paste, which he’s spreading across Maedhros’ scarred back, the latter laying face down on the sofa. It’s a ritual they have after the ritual of the ratheeb, where Fingon’s cool fingers spread a mixture that isn’t meant to heal, at least, not directly — but rather one that avoids more scarification than necessary. It’s quiet, brings Maedhros down to the ground and ties him back to Fingon, to where he belongs, and these days it is one of the only things that are constant and peaceful in his life. Or it would be, if the phone hadn’t rung shrilly, causing Fingon to jump and Maedhros to groan and reach out from where he lay, grabbing the receiver from its hook. 

“Comrade Maedhros. What? Someone better be on fire for you to call at this time.”

“Ah, my dear fellow, I don’t understand a word of what you’ve just said, but I gather that you are indeed Comrade Maedhros. Exactly the man I was looking for. Now, my name is Erei—“

Maedhros switches to English, albeit reluctantly. “Wrong number. Call one more time and I’ll send someone to your house and your kneecaps will not exist.”

Fingon snorts as Maedhros slams the receiver down: “who was that? Your other partner, hm?”

“Some English bastard,” Maedhros grunts, twitching his neck. “Down a bit, I managed to nick — yes —“

The phone rings again. 

“What the hell did I say to you about calling?” Maedhros snaps down the line heatedly. “Did I not —“

“Sorry, sorry, Mr. Fëanorian!” came a different voice, younger this time, and Maedhros is silent because he’s not been called Mr. Fëanorian in decades. “Sorry. My name is Aragorn, I’m the president of… I’m the president of the Oxford Progressive Students Society and I run the, er, student newspaper, Cherwell — I — I was Arwen’s friend.”

Maedhros blinks, grits his teeth, realises he can’t exactly put the phone down on this one. Bloody BA-Bolsheviks. “OK. What is it you want?”

“We were planning a little movement and from everything Arwen said… said about you, we thought it would be good to maybe ask you for your help," the young man's voice crackles down the line and Maedhros swallows hard, raises a hand for Fingon to stop his ministrations. 

“Arwen spea —“ he bites his lip against the language, sucks his teeth. “Arwen spoke about me?”

“About her grandfathers, yes, and how you were famous, where — where you lived for, er, getting stuff done,” Aragorn continues, and even through the faint line Maedhros can hear the first caller laughing heartily, saying you mean he had a doctorate in the breaking of bones! Still, the Party leader cannot help but smile, thinking of his granddaughter talking about him to her friends. 

“We were hoping you might be able to help us, Mr. Fëanorian. We’re planning to continue the movement she wanted — the, er, the statue thing. They’re putting the statue back up, you see.”

“Bastards.”

“Absolutely right, sir,” he can almost hear young Aragorn nod on the other end. “And we’ve decided we can’t let that happen. Me and Professor Gil-galad and —“

“Now that Aragorn has explained the existence of the idea,” the first caller had clearly snatched back the receiver, causing Maedhros to grimace and Fingon to giggle silently. “Let you and I arrange a time for us to call, and I will tell you exactly what we are thinking, how you will be able to assist us on an advisory basis, and of course — I will give you a perfectly coherent rundown, sorry Aragorn but this is above your pay scale, of the political spheres of the University of Oxford.”

Maedhros tamps down the understandable urge to batter the Professor for the sheer cadence of his voice, and sighs again. Thinks of Arwen telling her terrible professor about him, to the point this Gil-galad didn’t seem to blink an eye at his aggressive demeanour. He nods, and then remembers the other fellow can’t see him. “OK.”

“Outstanding! I’ll call you next Monday then, same time, and we can get plotting — I’ll have you know, I may be no breaker of legs but I certainly can cause a stir in my own way! And oh, can I just say — it is so wonderful to speak to a fellow friend of Dorothy's, long distance!” Gil-galad heartily exclaims into the phone, clearly having convinced himself of a friendship Maedhros had no clue about. “Like a global network of gentlemen’s gentlemen, how delightful! To think our fraternity has a member even in a small seaside town in India!” 

“Who is this Dorothy?” Maedhros grunts. “Your wife? Stop calling me her friend. I don’t know her.” 

“Ah, a term lost in translation, I see! I meant a fellow gay man, my friend,” Gil-galad explains. Maedhros is silent for a (very expensive, considering collect charges) time before responding:

“What is a gay?” 

Fingon squeaks. 

Gil-galad, for once, is struck dumb. “I… you are. You. You, Mr. Fëanorian.”

“No, I am not a gay,” Maedhros is adamant. “How can I be something I don’t know the meaning of? What is it? You people have too much words. Is it a job or crime or political party or what? I am a Communist, in-fact, a Marxist. Not a gay.”

“You… you live with a male partner and are intimate with him, you have never been with a woman, you have always preferred men, correct?” Gil-galad asks tentatively, as if Maedhros would bite him through the phone. 

Maedhros wonders whether to deny it just because the longer Gil-galad talks, the more years of his life Maedhros loses, and then realises that Fingon was currently straddling his back in order to reach around to a small cut just under his navel. He feels that lying may test the higher powers somewhat, and they were already not necessarily his biggest fan, considering his professional vocation. 

“Yes, yes, all correct.”

“So you’re gay.”

“No, I am not a gay.”

Fingon, on his back, sounds like he’s on the verge of choking. 

“If you’re living with a man you love and you view him like other men view women,” Gil-galad begins to argue, the professorial tone creeping back into his voice. “Then, you’re gay! We both are, my dear, there’s no shame in it!” 

“The person who made you an Oxford professor should be beaten black and blue,” Maedhros snaps, exasperated. “How many times must I tell you? I am not a gay, I am a Communist.” 

When he slams down the receiver, he realises Fingon, still straddling him, covered up to his wrists in turmeric paste, is shuddering with silent laughter, tears running down his face. 

“I am not a gay, I am a Communist,” he sobs, unable to control himself, streaking his own cheeks with turmeric as he tries to dry them. Maedhros tries to glare at him from where he lay, a rather difficult task considering their current position. “Maedhros, my darling, he’s right! You are gay. Oh, you sounded so annoyed, I thought I was going to die right here on your back.”

“You’re so clingy that’s where you’ll die anyway,” mutters his partner, before scowling again. “And why are you all calling me a gay? Your bloody father is a gay!”

“It’s not an insult! And it’s gay, not a gay,” Fingon wheezes. “It’s what you are! What this —“ he gestures between them. “What this is! Well, technically, I’m not a gay — damn, I’m not gay, see, your horrible English is confusing me also now — I like women also, and there’s another word for that but I don’t really care enough to remember.”

"Oh dear," Maedhros covers his face with a hand, laughing as well. "Bastard, you should have told me! Well, no matter. I did not like that man, if you couldn't tell."

They don’t mention it again, although Fingon has to remove himself from the room at least twice, I am not a gay, I am a Communist jumping into his head both times. Maedhros fries them up banana fritters for dinner because Fingon has an unjustifiable sweet tooth and Maedhros doesn't really want to look like he took anything Gil-galad said seriously, so it is only in bed that he gets to try the word out again. 

Gay, he thinks to himself, crickets screeching outside, Fingon snoring away beside him. He has never heard the word, he truly hadn’t been lying to Gil-galad (though lying to Gil-galad isn’t necessarily something Maedhros counts in any list of unforgivable sins). He’s never seeked out a word for himself, at least, not consciously. Fingon had never bothered either, but it had always been a little different for Fingon.

I am a… Maedhros, as fluent as he is, has never felt particularly confident in the English language, not even in his mind. No, not a gay. Gay.

His nose twitches, irritated. It simply doesn’t seem to fit him — English had always made him feel too large for every room, too wild, like he felt too much and did too much yet at the same time it rendered him diminutive. Maglor had gone to do a year of school in England, had been more comfortable in it. Not Maedhros. It made Maedhros feel two feet tall. 

GAY is three letters, a binding thing, constraining all he felt for Fingon into the boundaries of an uncomfortable language, and GAY separates him from Fingon because Fingon isn’t. Maedhros tries it out once more for luck, and then tosses it aside like an apple core. An English word would never have worked. Maedhros Fëanorian has too much history with the English. 

Still, as his eyes begin to close, and though he had never been particularly scholarly, he thinks that it isn't too bad, really — the knowledge that the awful professor walked around each day feeling as he, Maedhros, does. He comes up with a list of questions, like he’s in class, that had he been someone else — he would have presented to the professor. 

Did you ever wish that you were like other men? Did you lie awake at fifteen, bargaining with some higher power? Like… if I study for two hours tomorrow instead of one, then you will change me from what I am? How old were you when you stopped that? Are you happy? Is it different, in England? How does it feel to have a name? Are you allowed joy where you are from? Can you walk down the streets as you are? Can you be Maedhros-and-Fingon in England?

He knows he’d never ask these questions to anyone, let alone the loud professor. Still, there is something comforting in the knowledge that whilst Gil-galad probably didn't have the answers, he would have understood the questions at least. 

Perhaps one day, he thinks. Perhaps one day, when all this is over. 

Decades ago, the sixteen year old Maedhros-and-Fingon had made the cardinal decision to not only cross the line that separated living inside language from living outside it, but to build a house on the other side. They neither named the house nor looked back since. There is, after all, no word for what they are in Malayalam nor Hindi nor Urdu, not really, and you’d catch them dead before they agreed to slot themselves into any English word at all, let alone gay. So that’s why their house has no name, because it is a house built only for each other, a blueprint beyond their means to describe. 

Like many other former colonies, India in the sixties is full of such houses without names. And behind all these uncrossable thresholds lay indescribable riches: strange, queer journeys taken by the Maedhros-and-Fingons of this world, the joys and sufferings told without words, entire lives that exist beyond the comprehension of this language. 

All we can see in English are the little things, like the way Fingon sews patches into Maedhros’ shirts, or the splintered doorway panel from the time Maedhros forgot he was six-foot-something. Trivial events that leave impenetrably elaborate traces, so garbled as to be near-incommunicable and so camouflaged as to be entirely irrecoverable, because for the Maedhros-and-Fingons of this world, to be named is to be destroyed. 

It is said that on some warm evenings, unnamed houses all across our muted star link arms and whisper companionably as the sun sinks beneath their roofs. On such nights they huddle like teenagers over campfires, trust each other with stories of their inhabitants, and promise to leave no trace.

“Do you think it would have been better there?” Fingon asks quietly, now as awake as he is, as if he read his lover's mind in dreams and woke up to touch them. “Do you think it would have been easier?”

“In some ways," Maedhros shrugs, lopsided.

"Do you ever wish you were born there?"

“No,” Maedhros shakes his head.  Thinks about the word gay, and then the word terrorist. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“You would not? Such big buildings. Such high ceilings,” his lover sticks his leg out of the sheets as if to demonstrate, grinning as his toe brushes against their low faux-roof. 

Maedhros clicks his teeth in mild irritation, pulls Fingon closer to him and rearranges the blankets, resting his head on the broad shoulder. “But it is the same sky. Now shut your mouth. Sleep." 

Chapter Text

"Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, ki har Khwaish pe dum nikle, Bahut nikle mere armaan magar, phir bhi kam nikle."

Trans: there are a thousand longings within me, wearing away the years of my life. Much of these have been fulfilled, and have left me incomplete. 

Mirza Ghalib

For the people of Kozhikode, the most egregious thing about the news coverage around their beloved Comrade Maedhros' arrest and terror charge in 1951, had not been the arrest itself nor the accusation of terrorism. The charge had landed four years after Independence, when Kerala had been a spiky red thorn in poor, patient, progressive Prime Minister Nehru's side, having begun agitating for a secession from the Indian union: a spurious charge and ridiculous jail sentence was less outrageous and more daily-bread in those circumstances. 

Comrade Maedhros was, after all, a red-blooded revolutionary leader and for him to be arrested by the postcolonial state over a minor act of violence towards the previous occupying force, was not particularly surprising to anyone, least of all himself. India was only four years old, a vast territory only just united after decades of famine, oppression and bloodshed, but Indians were very quick to learn the fundamental tenet of nationhood that applies to every nation around the world: it is your civic duty to turn the other cheek as your country spits in your face. 

So the terror charge wasn't the problem. And yes, the seventeen-year-old twins being wrested away from their remaining father, who had been rendered utterly helpless by despair, was indubitably tragic, but the newborn nation had grown used to tragedy by then. 

No, the problem was neither of the above, but rather the fact that every single piece of reportage on the issue referred to the Fëanorians as having been a family of terrorists. On a surface level, it wasn't even wrong. The seven brothers and their father were an admittedly violent lot, as violence was the occupational hazard of being high up in the Party — if Maedhros didn't go around breaking kneecaps, someone else would break his. But we digress.

The actual problem was twofold: 

Firstly, a family of terrorists made terrorism sound like a congenital disease. And secondly, ask anyone in Kozhikode what they know of the Fëanorians, and they'll tell you about a family of artisans.

Fëanor had been a master sculptor and kalaripayattu practitioner: kalari was an ancient martial art unique to Kerala, a wild-yet-controlled combination of dance and duel performed with thin, blunted swords and shields – it had started out as a way to settle scores, and turned across centuries into an art form. His wife Nerdanel was one of the earliest black-and-white photographers in the Raj, an annexe of the old house serving as her darkroom. 

Fëanor carved his own kalari swords, because of course he did. He could shape bronze into filigree so fine it could catch the light like lace. They were all blunted at the edges because kalari, like the ratheeb, was all about performance, not violence, and was primarily a piece of theatre. Nerdanel’s hands lived in her darkrooms, hardened with developer, where they would lift out photographs so vivid yet dreamlike that they seemed spun from mist. Every son born to the two would have an entire photoshoot set up for him at the age of two, such luxuries unheard of for ordinary families, even in London. 

It did not matter very much, of course. The Raj had little need for beauty that did not serve a purpose. And consequently kalari had been banned by the British in 1805, so Fëanor's sword-carving and dance-fighting too, like the ratheeb, could be made into a terroristic act, depending on which eye you held closed. 

But even as Fëanor's apprentices starved or were shipped out, even when the establishment began to pay more for glass imported from across the sea than for hand-carved goblets, the nine of them worked at their crafts. Not because they were foolish, nor because they were blind to change, but because they refused to be undone. Because even as one world faded, they were certain another would rise. And if they did not carve doors for kings, then they would carve them for their comrades. If their tapestries no longer hung in the princely courts, then they were used as a baby’s bedspread, where chubby little hands would still reach out to touch them.  

The boys too followed in their parents footsteps for the most part: the fervent, queer Maedhros took to the ratheeb, which was artistic enough if you squinted and weren’t averse to blood, and motor-mouthed Maglor to the sitar. The young twins had been voracious readers and crafty enterprisers, having come up with the home-library concept in their early teens, a practice Maglor carried on in their name. All seven boys were artistically inclined, and all nine of the Fëanorians had been artisans right up to the day they became terrorists. 

Today, the only remnants of Fëanor's kalari practice are a set of blunted swords and a round, flat shield hanging over the doorway to the cliff-house. The instruments are sickening to look at: blue and crusty with corrosion, flakes landing upon anyone unlucky enough to cross the threshold at the wrong moment. Certain objects, heirlooms and mathoms and artefacts, are themselves worthless aside from the spectral, historical value ascribed to it. But Fëanor's blunted bronze swords, being nailed to the doorway of a place lovingly referred to as the madhouse, operated in reverse: they didn't hold a symbolic value so much as they spoke of a history that was entirely contradictory to stories told in newspapers and textbooks.

Now, because Elrond is and has always been an expert in being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he is showered by a gentle drift of diseased blue bronze-flakes as he marches into the living room, hands on his hips. 

"Boys," he snaps his fingers, and Elrohir – generally the more obedient of the twins – swings upside down on the sofa to at least pretend to listen. "Who on earth have you been on the phone to for this long? Your teacher is out of jail now, isn't he? You've got school next week, get upstairs and… Elladan, who on earth are you talking to?" 

"My girlfriend," Elladan hisses at him, waving him off. "Go away, silly, she's reading to me!" 

"My girlfriend too!" Elrohir swings back up like an affronted monkey, snatching the phone back off his brother. "You are my girlfriend too, right?" 

"Go outside, Uncle Elrond! This is private!"

"Did you know your six-year-old grandsons are sharing a girlfriend?" Elrond asks Maglor quite pleasantly a little while later, as the latter arrives back from the market, laden with various cuts of beef and an incredibly confused expression. "As a chronic bachelor yourself, do you… approve of such practices, Abba?"

"What girlfriend?" He shoves the packages onto the porch platform, ignoring Elrond's protests about it technically being his bed. "Who is sharing what?" 

"Oh, Elladan and Elrohir have been on the phone for a good half hour or so," Elrond shrugs, pointing at the living room and feeling bizarrely like he was telling on someone to a teacher. "Apparently it's a girlfriend, who's reading them something. Which is fine, of course, my issue is with the prospect of them sharing said girlfriend." 

"Hm, so the boys have been on the phone for half an hour, costing me god-knows how much in collect charges, and you…" Maglor looks up from the newspaper he was rolling up tightly. "...whom I specifically instructed to get them to their rooms and make sure they recognise at least one letter in the damned alphabet, just closed the door and decided to sit here on his arse?" 

"Well, I wasn't going to deny them their right to privacy!" 

Maglor looks at him blankly, and reflexively raises his rolled up newspaper, thwacking him on the side of the head. 

"Ouch!" 

"Privacy? Rights?" his father looks completely appalled. "Allah mian, how on earth does any child in your country survive infancy?" 

He ignores the second set of sputtered protests as he did the first, and marches into the living room, rapping on the door to get the boys' attention. This time, it is Elladan who pretends to listen as Elrohir sweet-talks their shared girlfriend. 

"Five seconds to put that phone down and tell me what bloody kidnapper you have given our address to, or else believe me, boys, I will be selling you to Celegorm," he warns them, holding up five fingers. "One, I've heard there's a rabies outbreak in his ke—"

"It's our girlfriend!" Elladan protests, pointing at Elrohir, who was nodding away as though a full love letter was being read out to him. "Five minutes, please!" 

"Who the hell are you calling your girlfriend?" Maglor's eyes widen even further as he puts a second finger down. "Indira Gandhi? Mother Mary? Fatima Jinnah? Hm? Florence Nightingale? Elrond's friend, Queen Elizabeth? Come, who is your beloved girlfriend?"

Elrond snorts, but is quelled with a look. Elrohir sighs at last, looking over at the duo, a very adolescent expression of irritation on his six-year-old face. 

"She's been calling since yesterday, and she promised to read us the Argos catalogue today," he explains, as if strange women reading out the Argos catalogue was a commonplace occurrence in his life. "We're only at p for propelling pencils. Go away, grandpa."

Maglor blinks, actually taken by surprise that there is in fact someone on the other end of the line. "Three. Who the hell is grandpa? Too good for Malayalam now, are you? And who is… who has been reading you this… what, catalogue, for the last two days right under your uncle's nose? Four."  

"Don't know," Elladan shrugs cheerfully. "Some crazy lady. Sounds like Elrond." 

“Five!”

Three things happen at once. Elrond makes a dive for the phone with an impromptu display of more athleticism than he has ever shown in his life, the twins are dragged out by a Maglor beginning to wish his days upon this earth were numbered, and Elladan and Elrohir develop a sudden, grudging respect for their uncle, solely due to said rugby tackle. 

Elladan nudges Maglor. "He’s good, he should go in for the state te—" 

"Up-STAIRS, you pair of uncorked djinns!" 

"Hello? Cel? Cel?" Elrond presses the receiver so hard to his face his ear begins to ache. "Is it you? Are you still there?" 

She's laughing. She's laughing on the other end of the phone. He hasn't heard her laugh in months. He hasn't heard her in months, not really. "Elrond, I don't know if I should be pleased to hear you, or offended that you only recognised it was me once the boy called me a 'crazy lady'! We were just getting to know each other, them and I! Though I will say, I've spoken on the phone to them so often when we used to call, I am actually quite offended they didn't recognise me." 

"I mean, it says something about you that you — instead of saying wrong number — or even asking for an adult, just began reading them the Argos catalogue," he finds himself laughing too. "It could have been anyone — phone numbers here don't exactly stay the same, you know, especially not for ISD international calls!"

"Oh, I knew it was your house the minute the kids answered with laal salaam, Comrade, red salute Comrade, instead of hello," she chuckles. "Besides. I like children." 

And there it is. The herd of elephants. 

Elrond grits his teeth, tries to move past the sudden awkward silence. He can't. 

"How are you?" he asks at last, weakly. "Have you been…" 

"Released?" she too sounds relieved at not having to laugh. "Yes. Yes I have been. I've been staying at my parents', but Ereinion was planning something in Oxford, so I'm on my way there now — well, tomorrow, you know what I'm like."

He does. Cel once told him she was 'on her way' to dinner with him when she had, in fact, only gotten out of the shower. 

"Why? As in, why does he need you there for it? I thought it was more of an academic… well, I don't actually know what he's planning," Elrond frowns. "Cel, if it's anything like a protest, please don't…"

"Why not?" 

He raises his eyebrows, forgetting she can't actually see him. "Cel… what do you mean why not?" 

"It's not a bad idea, which is more than I'd usually say about Ereinion's ideas," Cel continues, cutting off his question. "Elrond, please. I'm no revolutionary, I'm just going to offer him a hand, and it's a day of work. It's… journalistic more than anything." 

"Yes, well, so is war reporting," he mutters, and his eyes glisten as she laughs. 

"And Elrond, after that, whatever it is, I was thinking…" she sounds unsure all of a sudden. "I was thinking, maybe I could come over. If… if your fathers don't mind. I've missed you."

"Me too," he swallows hard. "Oh, Cel, I'm sorry. I'm re—"

"Hush. Let's not talk about that now, El, I'm exhausted. I… I'd like to come see you." 

"Yes, yes, of course! Of course," and Elrond finds himself shaking his head, smiling. "Please. I'd love to have you here. I'd…" 

"Good, I'd have been very annoyed if you'd said no," Cel counters pertly. "Though you should probably ask Maglor, considering you're not the one running the house. Unless he has you doing that too, in which case, the man must be a miracle worker."

"Well, he is, though unfortunately he's not rubbed off on me very much. And he'll probably give me another one about the head with today’s paper if I ask him if you can stay. Of course you can, the man will probably prefer you staying than me, judging by the last ten minutes…”

Maglor does give Elrond another one about the head with the same newspaper, not for asking if Celebrían could stay, but for her even thinking she needed to ask which, in Maglor’s mind, “is almost definitely your fault. You made me sound like a dragon, didn’t you? Or a landlord. Elrond, you made me sound like a bloody landlord, didn’t you?”. It goes without saying that being a landlord is one of the biggest insults in the Fëanorian household, to the point Maedhros once threatened a real estate broker for looking at him as though he might be interested in owning a second house.

Maglor sends Elrond upstairs to the twins with firm instructions to not return unless the children could spell their own names, “and I don’t care if all of you starve to death up there, I am not sending these children to that school having forgotten what a book looks like, after the supreme scolding I received all those years ago for allowing Maedhros to make you and Elros call him Comrade instead of Baba.” He then walks into the kitchen to clean, take inventory and tie up anything too-sweet or outright poisonous out of reach of the twins. He yanks the rope higher up, because after the palaver with the phone, he no longer trusts Elrond to not happily give the children mothballs and rat poison to suck on if they asked politely enough. On his way out, he notices the Malayala Manorama calendar hanging up in the dining room — the month has just turned, and so must the calendar. 

There are two red letter days on this quarter, he realises. Eid, of course, after Ramzan. And then a fortnight before, a black number circled in red ink — Arwen’s birthday. He takes the calendar off the wall, not wanting Celebrían and Elrond to encounter the reminder each time they walk to the kitchen, and brings it to his own room, pinning it on the wall. 

Hearing a shriek from outside, he speeds to the window: Elrond and the twins at the bottom of the low cliff, clearly having given up on scholarly pursuits and instead immersing themselves in a wild, unruly game of three-man cricket. His son misses the swing, spins effortlessly, kicks one of the wickets down. Elrohir clambers onto his shoulders in mock-fury at the blatant attempt to cheat while Elladan speeds off to retrieve the ball. All three of them, disobeying his direct instructions and having a whale of a time doing so. 

Now Elrond is trying to make his runs, bending to touch the sand on each end as proof he’s run the full length, and Elladan is counting the seconds, grin glowing and face flush with delight because the two boys had never known a father and you too would look like that if someone who looks like the person who should have been your father turns up at your doorstep. And not only lets them skive off work but plays cricket with them in the afternoon sun, when everything is hot and blue and white, the sand, the rocks, every inch of the cliffs, sea and sky rippling forwards and backwards across the three of them. 

Maglor knows he should probably go down there and tell them off before the twins, like their grandfathers and great-uncles, flunk magnificently out of school and lead lives where kneecap-shatterings are commonplace. Maedhros is the best budget-cricketer in these parts, always has been. They used to split into teams, he and his brothers, and Maedhros would always insist on having Caranthir on his team: not because he was any good, but because he needed to be “kept under a leash”. And how many times has Maglor sat upon this very sill, watching Maedhros take on Elrond and Elros at once, the same game with different players: and his brother would let the children win at least two thirds of the time — this, the man who was once a teenager that dangled Curufin out over the forest-lake for even thinking about a foul ball. 

Such similar shapes they make, yet not the same. Curufin and his wife live ten hours away, and the Ambarussa were killed in the early days of the anticolonial riots. And Elros, his Elros, Abba’s very own Elros, his baby who ran back to him the moment he could — sweet, kind Elros, who loved his Baba too much to not pretend he inherited his fury. His Elros, that bright young college student who put down his books and took up the flag, who climbed onto a bus and called for a nationwide strike instead of appearing for his final exam. And now, all these years later, what is left of him? A streak of rubber on a faraway road? A red-and-black mural on every blank wall, a place of honour in every revolutionary song? Two fatherless six-year-olds raised by their grandfather? 

Ghosts under a cliff, new bodies that align with but don’t fit into the old shadows, all these small things batted about by the resolute cruelty of the world. The cliff is lower now than it was before, the beach is narrower, more ragged, nibbled away by the sea. Still, even these remains have a sullen resilience, even the image of Elrond trying to shake off his barnacle-nephews has a strange cohesion to it. Like they were always meant to be here: these shapes upon this seascape. Maglor does not go down to chastise the three, and neither does he join them in their pursuits. He sits on the windowsill instead, the salt-stung air brushing past his cheeks, and fervently wishes for the game to never end. 

“Kozhikode District Communist Party Branch Office,” at the Party office, Maedhros snaps into the receiver pressed between his shoulder and ear, glaring at nothing in particular other than the fact that this seemed to be his second long-distance phone call in a week. “Laal salaam, comrade, Branch President speaking.”

“Good afternoon, may I speak to Elrond if he’s around at the moment? I’m calling from Devonshire, in England.” 

“No.”

“Ah, would you be able to let me know when he might be around to take a call? I tried calling the house, but the line was occupied.”

“Hello, woman, if your Devonshire milkman does not deliver your milk on time tomorrow, will you be calling the Kozhikode District Communist Party Branch Office to complain?” he asks testily, foot tapping faster on the floor as a mark of his irritation. “You want Elrond, you call him yourself. Do I look like a pigeon?”

“I am genuinely rather confused as to how Elrond is as mild mannered as he is, if you were the one who dragged him up,” the woman actually sounds quite impressed. “Do you speak like this to everyone?” 

“No, only people I don’t like. Now, who are you, and why on earth are you calling me to find Elrond? Does he look like a revolutionary cadrè to you? You think I’ve got him painting the hammer and sickle onto the Opposition’s garden wall? I have not seen him since he was seventeen.”

(He makes a quick mental note to get Celegorm to do that exact thing). 

The woman remains unruffled, though slightly surprised. “You’ve not seen him? He’s been there for weeks and weeks, Mr. Fëanorian.”

“Comrade. And who are you to tell me when I should or shouldn’t see my s — shouldn’t see Elrond?” 

“His mother,” says the voice dryly. “My name is Elwing. I’m truly quite pleased to meet you, Comrade Fëanorian, he used to talk about you all the time.”

Maedhros, for once, is utterly lost for words. He makes a strangled sound, tilts it up at the end so it would sound at least a little like the verbal manifestation of a question mark. Elwing seems to take it, and him, in stride. 

“And in my defence,” she barks back at him. “Ereinion was acting cagey about your house number, as if he himself personally dug it out of the archives. And, Comrade Fëanorian, if you don’t appreciate call —“

“Maedhros.”

“Pardon me?” 

“Maedhros. Just call me that. You make Comrade sound like an insult.”

There’s a hushed hum to the line, and Maedhros realises she’s covered the receiver with her hand, probably to hide her laughter. His utter confusion only grows. 

“All right, Maedhros. Now as I was saying, if you didn’t want to receive international phone calls at your beloved Party office, then you shouldn’t have put an international line in. I thought your people —“

“My what?” 

“Communists, my dear man, get a grip. I thought your people were meant to be economically astute.”

Maedhros considers making a vulgar retort involving how the final word of Elwing’s sentence might sound to someone who doesn’t know what astute meant, and then tamps down the impulse. “I was expecting a call from your country.”

“Ah, from Celebrían? She had mentioned wishing to visit.”

“No, from the gay.” 

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry. From the homosexual,” Maedhros runs his finger across his notebook where he had Fingon write down the word in English and phonetic Malayalam. “And that is not you. So please cut the line and go make your own phone call.”

“I… do you mean Ereinion?” 

Maedhros puts the phone down on her, and tries to forget that she ever called. But that isn’t how minds work, certainly not minds like his — self destructive and constantly chafing against its own self, insatiable in the worst ways. The old question rises up in him, the one he’s had ever since Elros turned up at visiting hours in prison and wept on his shoulder like having not seen Maedhros and Maglor for three or so years whilst living in the lap of luxury was the worst thing that ever happened to him. That was the day he stopped cursing Elwing with every breath he had left in him (though he maintained a firm litany of curses for Eärendil, the chutiya sisterfucking Viceroy’s chutiya sisterfucking secretary, and would continue to do so all his life), but never did he tell anyone the reason, because he himself had not known the reason, and would not have been able to ask her. Not because it was impossible, but because he was afraid of the answer. And so like the rot, the question too, had lived quietly inside him, unforgettable but not disruptive, until it rears its ugly head today the minute her voice rang in his ears. 

Maedhros is an impulsive man. He has never claimed to be anything but. 

He snatches the receiver back up, barks out instructions to the telephone exchange office, sends a silent apology up to Marx for the utilisation of Party Communication funds for nefarious purposes. 

“Good afternoon, Elwing spe—“

“You never told them,” Maedhros sounds accusatory, snappy, yet the distant line crackling across his voice softens its hardness. “Your sons. You never told them it was us. Why you didn’t do that?”

“It was you who what? Sorry? Is this Maedhros again?” 

“The riot and the lathi horse charge, the day you lost them, that day we found them,” he finds it hard to get the words out, though he knows the answer anyway. “It was Maglor, my brother Caranthir and I, who set off the charge. It was us who organised the general strike. And you knew that from the first day — our names were on the charge sheet for the incident report.” 

“Are you accusing me of having any idea they were with you? Maedhros, I thought they were dead. I was told they were, by the police — and if you don’t recall, the police were very much on ‘our’ side at the time, so to speak, so there would be very little sense in disbelieving them.”

Maedhros clicks his teeth, annoyed. “No, I am not saying that. I know you thought they were dead, until you saw them in the papers after — after my arrest. No. I am asking you why you didn’t tell them we were the ones responsible for you losing them in the first place? We organised that riot. Obviously we did not know there were children, and really, Madam, you have destroyed enough of ours that I would not have given a damn even if I did. But I have openly admitted to organising it, no? And us three were accused of it then itself. But you did not tell the boys, even after you took them away from us. I am asking you why you did not do that?” 

“How do you know I didn’t tell them?” she asks slowly, as if trying to evade the question. “Did Elrond tell you?”

“No, I haven’t spoken to him, I said already. No, I am saying this because of Elros. I know that boy like my own blood, and he rushed back here the minute he could, rushed back to Maglor. And he is so… righteous, so concerned with doing right by people, we would argue all the time about whether leg-breaking is a necessary part of politics. I know that if that boy knew we were the cause of you letting go of them, he would not have rushed back like that. At least not in the way he did. He would not have been so angry with… with you only. He would at least have asked us about it. And I think you also know that. So why you didn’t tell them?”

Elwing doesn't answer immediately, and he doesn't expect her to. She closes her eyes, leans against the cool wall. 

“I couldn’t,” she says at last. 

“Because you are better than us?” he offers brusquely. The question has chafed at him for decades, and it is tearing him from the inside out to finally let it out into the world. “Because you are more moral? Turned other cheek?” 

Elwing doesn’t know how to explain it without reminding him that he has never seen his granddaughter, not really. And after she and Celebrían had found three drawerfuls of letters in both English and Malayalam, between Arwen and her grandfather, letters Celebrían and Elrond had no clue about, that Elrond still has no clue about — she cannot bear to remind him of such a thing. Every letter to Arwen had started with a winking, tongue-in-cheek to my dear little revolutionary, love in every curve of every letter of the phrase.

My dear little terrorist, Elwing had thought, rather hysterically, the same bout of rapid hysteria that had her, weeks ago, calmly drop her transistor radio in the duckpond the first time a newsreader had referred to Arwen as anything but a child. 

Our dear little terrorist, Comrade Maedhros and I, and our dear little terrorist. 

She cannot explain how six years ago she stood in a crowd watching her not-yet-thirteen year old granddaughter heckle and painstakingly shatter every single line of Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’. Elwing who lived in the Raj and had ayahs and amahs and servants galore, whose husband was given the highest honour of the Commonwealth, whose country was now broiling with rage at having to stand side-by-side with their former subjects, frothing at the mouth at having to bear witness to the costs of conquest. And then there was Arwen. 

“I wasn’t the one who caused the Bengal famine,” Arwen’s opposition had said, in her first mock school debate, a young redhead, just as young as Elwing’s granddaughter and already heir to a country manor. “Reparations from the state would be funded by the taxpayer. By me! But it wasn’t I that caused the famine, it wasn’t any of my family! We didn’t leave these shores.”

“No you didn’t, Tristan,” Arwen had kept her cool, and her father’s odd, irreconcilable accent. “But your shite-for-brains granddad stuffed himself on the stolen grain that starved them.” 

Elwing had clapped from the sidelines because by that point she had reconciled herself to a lifetime of clapping from the sidelines. And of course she dedicated herself to the task wholly, clapping just the same as her grinning twelve-year-old granddaughter was wrestled off the stage just six months later for disrupting Enoch Powells’s stupendously racist speech, did not feel in touch with her own country or anyone in it, but rather found herself thinking about a man she had not thought about for decades. She looked at Arwen and had seen both Maedhros Fëanorian and herself, and instead of the abject terror she should have felt, she found herself admiring the admixture of fierce defiance and cool entitlement. It felt like an exoneration. For the two of them, a blonde, blue-eyed woman and a dark-eyed, dangerous man, the Queen’s third cousin and the charge-sheeted terrorist, an exoneration for all that happened that should never have happened.

Looking at Arwen upon her first true pedestal that day, promising and starry-eyed and megaphone-mouthed, she understood that history had never been a fixed thing. The past transforms as people change, and one day one might look back at one’s own life and decipher different truths, other designs, unfamiliar faces. She and Maedhros had never once spoken but in Arwen they were thrown together. Though she shared no blood with either of them, Arwen was the result of an ongoing process that began decades before her birth, her triumph at the rally inextricable from who Elwing had been and who Maedhros had been. And in turn, Arwen unknowingly became crucial to the people Maedhros and Elwing would become one day, and to the parts they would play in each other’s lives.

She cannot explain it because that moment was not the reason she never told her sons the circumstances of their separation, it was simply a tool with which to explain it — explain that Elwing was simply doing what Maedhros did with the ratheeb, a way of trying to atone. To him, she only says one thing: "because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time." 

“You mean you should not have brought your children to the square?” he asks, teeth clenched. “And for that you…”

“No, Maedhros,” her voice turns thick all of a sudden. “We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning all of us, you, your brother, Eärendiil and I, the boys, all of us were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should not have been there. None of us should have been there in that square on that day. You would not have been there, had we not been there. Do you understand what I mean? We should not have been there.” 

Maedhros breathes in, holds it, because Elwing is not talking about them as individuals. Nations, always nations. It always comes down to this with them, it is always the lime squeezed over every wound. He cannot find the words, not in English, so he waits and waits until finally, Elwing breaks the silence again. 

“What were we doing there?” she asks all of a sudden. “The other day, a new acquaintance asked what Eärendil was doing in the Raj, what his job had been. And I couldn’t answer. I don’t know. I don’t know what he was doing, what any of us were doing there. All of that happened, all of that sorrow and pain and unfairness and I couldn’t tell you what it was all for.” 

Maedhros is still silent. At last, he says: “me also. I also don’t know what we were doing. But that was all I could do. My father, he —“

“Was an artisan. I know.”

Maedhros inhales sharply. It is the first time, the first time in decades, before the twins were even born, that he has heard anyone call Fëanor an artisan. Not even his brothers had referred to him as that, most of them having been too young to remember Fëanor the sculptor, the martial artist, the dreamer. And to think that it is Elwing, the woman who took back her children, his children, took them away from him, that it is her calling his father an artisan, with such a tender, admiring fret in her voice. 

“You know he was an… how?” 

“Look at Elrond,” she says, as if it is obvious, and then she laughs. “He’s no singer, and thank the stars he isn’t… whatever you are. I didn’t know, but I guessed. From how Elrond is, and from the photos, in later years, that Elros would send or bring over at Christmas, of your house. No offence to you, Maedhros, but it didn’t seem like you were the sort of person to sit around carving door knobs. From that and Elrond, yes, I guessed your father must have been some sort of artisan.” 

Maedhros, again, cannot find words. Nobody has ever compared Fëanor to Elrond. Not when Maedhros was there wreaking havoc, not when Curufin was shouting Naxalite slogans from the rooftops and Caranthir began arming the jungles, not when Elros turned into a silver tongued speechifier — all fitting easily into Fëanor’s loudest hollows. Nobody has ever compared him to Elrond, nobody but Maedhros, that one night when Elrond had just turned seventeen. 

It is the Empire, he knows. This has always been what it does best, creating chaos and unruliness under the banner of order. It is a rot, it has always been a rot, eating nations and peoples from within. Turning sons into exiles, fathers into criminals, and mothers — Britannia, with her unfathomably beautiful face and flowing hair and sceptre, displacing mothers from motherhood without a second thought. 

Everyone, everywhere, all of them in the wrong places at the wrong time. And what is left? Of what should have been a family of two folk artisans and their seven sons and a family of two diplomats and their twin baby boys, two families that in a just universe would never have come into contact. The great and terrible tangle of history, turning artisans into terrorists, scholars into exiles. And there sit the two of them, poised on the ends of an international telephone line. Elwing and Maedhros, connected only by a shared, unspeakable identity: grandparents who have outlived their grandchildren. 

“I am sorry it is like this now,” Maedhros manages to say at last. “I am sorry you never saw your sons.”

“And I am sorry you never saw your granddaughter,” she sighs heavily. “But go see Elrond, Maedhros. He called out for you. You don’t know it and he’ll never tell you. But he did, as I sat with him one night, the week after Arwen… oh, Maedhros, go to him. Let’s put this right. He’s not like us.”

Maedhros drags in a long, unsatisfying breath, nods. “No,” he agrees. “He’s not like us.” 

It is three in the morning when he leaves the Party office. He’d taken dinner with Fingon, told him he would be staying in the cliff-house tonight, but couldn’t bring himself to leave his desk until it was not only pitch black outside but bordering the dawn. 

“Do you want me to come with you?” Fingon had asked as he sat down with him for a quick dinner, worried by the sudden decision and by how ill Maedhros had looked. “I’m sure Maglor wouldn’t mind.”

“No, no, not tonight. Elladan and Elrohir have some sort of radar for when you’re nearby,” Maedhros pointed out, straightening from his weary slump. “Somehow turns them ten times as hyperactive as normal. You’re like a defective bedtime story, better stay home.” 

“Are you going to talk to Elrond?” 

“I have to, don’t I?”

Of course, Elrond is fast asleep by the time Maedhros makes his way to the house. Maedhros, of course, is completely aware of Elrond’s tendency to be utterly dead to the world by the time the clock strikes midnight. It buys him a few hours. 

The cliff-house emerges from the tree-trunks as it always does, the narrow path leading up, up, up to the crossed swords and brittle shield sickening over the doorway. And whatever nausea touches him at the sight of crossed swords like a cross over a plague-house disappears as he smells tulasi leaves planted under the porch, the heaving floor of fallen flowers under the trees. There is life inside this plague-house, they say. There lives something within these spaces, there is something left. There is something in this house that defies naming, defies categorising, something uncallable. But it is here. Maedhros shucks off his slippers at the step. Turns to duck indoors and startles — Elrond is asleep on the porch, in plain view of anyone walking up to the house. Maedhros just hadn’t seen him.  

He’d seen Elrond asleep right here on countless occasions, eyes shut tight, Maedhros’ voice blending into the voices of the weavers of his dreams. Standing there, he feels as if the lost-ways of fatherhood are all huddled in the wooden platform his son sleeps on, twisted into the fading pillars holding up the roof, in the bloated, fruity rot of the waterlogged woodpile. As if the house hosts time itself, hosts Elrond’s past and Elros’ foreclosed future, and all the futures that could have been. All the lost things had formed four feudal-style walls and lay down in a row near the middle-courtyard, dying companionably in an underfunded archive. Of course he didn’t notice Elrond’s sleeping form at first. Some hollows live too deep inside him for him to recognise the shapes that fit them. If one was to stand before you with an armful of gall bladders, could you pick out your own?

He walks closer, sees that Elrond’s hair is spread across his face because he has carried into adulthood a fervent aversion to the concept of keeping it braided at night. Maedhros used to have to pin him between his knees, all of five and as slippery as they come, oil the ends and the roots, and remind him that if he didn’t sit still, Queen Victoria would rise from the dead and eat him up at night. Maglor had been horrified by that particular bogeyman, as close as it had been to the time he got a letter from the boys’ head-teacher accusing Maedhros of teaching them the socialist anthem The Internationale, from “arise, ye wretched of the earth” to “the wage slave system drains our blood” — and convincing the children it was a song meant to be sung over every birthday cake. 

The last evening he and Elrond had spent together upon this porch was only two months before his arrest. The boys had just turned seventeen, had been thinking about what they would do after school — a schooling that Maglor had truly lost years of his life over, supervising the two from scrawled letters to sums to essays, because “if you flunk out like your idiot of a father, then that’s it, my boys, it’s leg-breaking every Tuesday for the rest of your life.”

“Don’t tell Elros,” Elrond had whispered that night, and then crossed a little X over his heart. “Don’t, you’ve got to promise. He’ll laugh at me. He wants to go into politics, like you, and I’m sure if I tell him what I really want to do, he’ll only make fun.” 

“Don’t worry, if he makes fun, I’ll make him beat up Finarfin’s son,” Maedhros had snorted. “As practice for his career. And that Finrod is built like a bull, mind you, what Finarfin feeds him I do not wish to know. Now you tell me, what do you want to do? We’ve saved enough to send you both to college — in Delhi, even, not only here. JNU, maybe, bastion of student activism it is. But Elrond, you tell me you want to be a banker or estate agent or something, I’ll take you out back and put you down like a dog, you hear me?”

Elrond cackled along with him, clutched his heart in mock horror. “No, no — Baba, hush, you’ll wake Abba. No, I thought, maybe, I’d like to write, and not just write, I’d… I’d like to teach.” 

“Writing what? Newspapers? I’ll get you a job in the Manorama tomorrow itself, the politics editor owes me a few favours. Or he’s scared of me, I can’t remember.”

“No, not for the bloody paper! No, I want to write a book, a proper novel — about here, maybe,” he looked over shyly. “And maybe if I get good enough at it, I could teach people how to write too. Not in school, I mean in universities. But there’s not much money in it, Celegorm said. Said artists and writers were doomed to starve. So maybe I won’t —“

“And you listened to Celegorm? Maybe you are too stupid for university. That brother of mine needs to be reminded he can read at regular intervals. You want to be a writer?” 

“I do. Really, I’d love to write a real book. A novel. And I’d love even more to teach writing, once I’m good enough.” 

“Then that’s what you will be,” Maedhros had snapped his fingers, as if that was that. “And shut up with this not-telling-Elros, not-telling-Celegorm nonsense. I will be telling them all tomorrow, myself. My Elrond is going to be a writer, and he’s going to write a book. I will print it out on a flag and hoist it over the Party office. Just watch.”

“Not tomorrow!” Elrond hissed, turning bright red. “And no bloody flags! Absolutely not! But oh, Baba, I was so, so certain you’d think it was, I don’t know. A soft choice. Not revolutionary enough.”

“Your brother eats, sleeps and shits the revolution, one is enough in each generation,” his father raised his hand in a mock salute. “And who told you it’s a soft choice, hm? All revolutions start with the written word, you know that. All books are battlefields in their own way. You can change someone’s mind with every book, no?” 

“Well, sometimes only in little ways.”

“Doesn’t matter. To change the way someone looks at something — to make them see more than what was there before, that’s everything,” Maedhros leaned forward, as fervent as he was at rallies. “Like my Baba. He was an artist too. And a teacher. Like you.”

Maedhros shook his head then, repeated his own words as if he couldn’t believe them himself. “My Elrond. My Elrond, a writer.” 

He looks down at Elrond now, brushes the hair gently away from his face so he can get a proper look at his face. His chest seizes slightly — because Elrond is fast asleep and dead to the world and still, the lines around his eyes don’t relax, his mouth is drawn downwards. All these new lines and old marks, the scar on his hairline, that he wasn’t around to watch bloom. He looks very like Elros, a sadder, paler Elros. But seeing him like this, after seeing him at seventeen is like watching a house come crashing down right before you. As if the ravaging took place in a single  day. 

And now, here sit the remains. His slippers, resting on the floor, the imprint of his feet darkened into them by use. A half-drunk cup of tea, the pen beside a full notebook, its cap missing, its ink dried mid-thought, like the nights Fëanor fell asleep on this very porch, mid carving. Maedhros reaches out for the pen to cap it, shudders at the awful, unchanging patience of inanimate things, extraordinary ordinary little things that circumvent space and time. How strange, he thinks, that the world should allow hollows to endure while the shapes that filled them could not. He puts the pen back without capping it. He cannot bear to change the shape of familiar things. Maedhros wrenches himself away, walks over to the straw easy-chair in the far corner that Fëanor used to occupy, and sinks down into it. 

All the worst in my father, he left me. All the best in me, I gave my sons. 

He often likes to picture what Fëanor might have been like, had he been allowed to reach old age. In that world, they all live in the cliff-house, all nine of them. Maedhros is certain beyond certainty that an elderly Fëanor would have accumulated a world of small eccentricities, each one both comfort and necessity. He might often be found on the verandah, reclining in an old cane chair angled just slightly askew, as if he saw the world better when lopsided. A checked wool shawl, frayed at the edges, will always drape over his shoulders, no matter the season. 

I’m an old man, he might say. I can feel cold when I damn well want to. On the table, a collection of mismatched teacups, each with a story, each with a chip in the rim because Fëanor approached teacups like he approached most things: with teeth. And always, perched atop his head, there will be a soft velvet cap, once crimson, faded into something gentler, the tassel swaying as he nods off in the late afternoon sun.

He thinks of Fëanor and the shape he takes in his memory — solid, shifting, cast in metal though never still. A tarnished statue built of sharp edges and hollows housing all that was taken from him. But in the end, what shape had his father taken? Maedhros wonders if Fëanor himself ever saw his own image clearly, or if he, too, was always reaching for some outline that blurred at the edges. 

The truth, it must be said, is that in that other world, the one in which Fëanor lived to his dotage, Maedhros would have been an artist like his father. No, not even at the ratheeb — nothing so self flagellating as that, because the other world is not so cruel. He would be an abstract artist and his oil works would be renowned for their queerness, their heat-charged daring, the experimental cliff-fall feeling about them. He would hold his first gallery exhibition at nineteen in that world, and critics would marvel at the shrewd kindness of his brush-strokes and the expansive welcoming nature of his subjects — “paintings that inadvertently cure society of its ills”. The saddest part of the world we live in instead of that other world, is not how in this one, nineteen year old Maedhros does not open a gallery but tosses a homemade bomb in retaliation to police violence and loses the use of his dominant hand. No, the real tragedy of this world is that Maedhros had always been devastatingly, silently aware of what he could have been in that other one.

And what survives of him? Maedhros reaches out, runs his fingers over the warm, ridged belly of the brass knob of the door to the main house. Fëanor, the father of a terrorist and the great-grandfather of another. And Fëanor, the hand-carved bell of the temple, the ornate mosque gate wrought in bronze, the delicate steeple frozen upon the town church, wings stilled in flight. There are no heroes and villains, only starving dogs eating each other in the dark. 

His father was not spared history’s cruelty, he was not spared its rage, and Elrond was not spared its sorrow. But Arwen. His granddaughter was born in a country where the sun was said to never set. Arwen had never stepped foot in India. The Empire had fallen by the time Arwen was born. She was meant to be safe from the rot. There had seemed to be no reason for her to need to know how to navigate the murky floodwaters of history, guided not by stars but by old, misunderstood echoes of the past, weeping transliterated to war cries.  

They had dragged Fëanor and his students and his wife and his three oldest sons, just twelve, eleven and nine, off to prison for a week and a night because kalari was banned by the British, if you recall. The five of them had a lovely time in prison, sat around playing cards with each other — Maedhros remembers how Maglor had planned an entire jailhouse theatre repertoire, only to be released the day after. It was commonplace, these little stunts, jail time and public draggings-to-prison. But on that morning when they returned home, all of Fëanors bronze carved swords and shields, implements of violence they called them, had been thrown into a shallow salt-pond on the beach. Not just the kalari props but everything that had been in his studios — the photo-frames, the jewelry, the sculptures, his tools. Marble shattered to dust and bronze not thrown into the sea to be lost, but into a salt-pond to be corroded, because the custodians of history knew precisely what would sicken metal beyond repair. Young Maedhros had watched as Fëanor walked into the water and retrieved every single item from the pond, then methodically threw each one into the sea. He kept only two swords bound to corrode irreversibly, a shield destined for the same, and a single bangle that would outlive him, gold being incredibly difficult to spoil. 

Who burns the instruments of art?

Who burns the songs and stories of a people? 

Nations whose fingers itch with a desire to build pyres out of people, leaders clambering over each other to be the one who strikes the match. They burned Brecht and Joyce in Europe and libraries in Namibia. In Delhi they burned Tagore and in the Congo they piled up hands atop hands. In Kerala, they threw Fëanor’s blunted swords into the sea. Water too can be dangerous, when sailed by sea-monsters. 

Fëanor the artist dragged himself back from the shore, shellshocked beyond recognition. He hung the rescued swords over the entrance to the house, marking the beginning of the rot. The hollow man slid the bangle onto Nerdanel’s wrist, a wordless apology in his eyes that he could not find its counterpart. That bangle lived for decades in her old jewelry box, which in turn became the gift box Maedhros and Maglor had curated for Arwen’s wedding. And then Fëanor went to the kitchen out back, grabbed a set of worthless fish knives, and began to sharpen them without a word. The next day, he climbed atop the Party headquarters, and organised the first regional strike of dozens, because nonviolence may one day work for Gandhi but it had not worked for Fëanor the terrorist. 

The rest of the artefacts bubbled away into the ocean, though a small jewelled gold bangle, the missing counterpart, was in fact taken by a young policeman. He was a good man, he had not seen it as a theft, had intended to give it to his paramour as a gift, and that he did the very same evening. And she adored it and kept it as an heirloom, because the English were — if nothing else — a people who cared deeply for heritage. They knew what made marble and metal sick, they knew the origin of rot, and nursed their old houses and statues and heirlooms so such rot would never touch them, would never break down priceless craft. 

So yes, that policeman had put a single bangle in his pocket and presented it to his partner that evening, and they spent a romantic evening sketching out a set of jewelry they would buy when they were back home in Sussex, just to match the thick gold bangle. It is strange, of course, but unsurprising. That little loves and lives took place amidst rot. While books were burned and swords were drowned, a policeman and his paramour were sketching out designs for necklaces and wedding gowns, and longing for good and proper tea cakes. The bangle would be cherished and beloved through decades, and ultimately would be lost by the policeman’s great-great-granddaughter at some point in the nineties, a talented girl studying Fine Art in London, who accidentally dropped the bangle in a canal after a night out. It was neither her fault, nor her bangle. 

Maedhros watches Elrond sleep until his eyes sting and he closes them against the threat of tears, and falls asleep right there in the easy-chair. From a distance they make small, insignificant shapes, their sorrows small, insignificant sorrows. Like this is not the story of nations nor of a family of terrorists and their entanglements with an empire, like all this is nothing but a story of an artisan and his craft: a small sea-story, a ghost story packaged in a children’s book, about Fëanor and his two gold bangles. It ends with a young artist who dropped one in a river, and a little terrorist who would never, ever get to wear its counterpart. 

Chapter Text

To my dear little revolutionary,

It is commonly said that there is nothing in the world worse than an unsent letter, aside from a letter you write knowing it will be unsent. I could never write to your father, as you know, sent or unsent. But he's right before me, right here on the porch, fast asleep and dead to the world and I cannot sit still but nor can I go up to Elros and his old room, so here I am writing to you as we had done each month. 

More than ten years — and I will be truthful to you, as I always am, I had to write out the sum on another paper, before I got the answer — one hundred and twenty four from you and another one hundred and twenty four from me. And I was looking at the number thinking, oh, this feels familiar, this number — and then I remembered, ha, of course I knew the count of letters in my drawer, I knew it by-heart. How silly of me that was! 

(This is, as I often tell you, why you are in Oxford University, and I flunked out of tenth standard.)

They had shown your speech on the English channel one month after Elrond phoned with the news about you. I was sitting with Maglor at the party office, we were trying to put together a communications plan for the election (as you know, Arwen, the Emergency was to come to an end this year), and they had shown a small part of your final speech on the channel. It was the World channel, and so they did not censor nor cut your words off, they were there, sentence after sentence for your grandfathers to hear.

I have known you so well, I have your words to me by-heart, but I had never, never heard you speak to a crowd. Maglor began to get upset, tried to shift the channel but I could not stop watching — I could not stop watching you. And he could not grasp why I looked the way I looked, he thought it was because of the fact it was you, not because of what you were saying. It was five minutes, of what must have been hours and hours of speeches across your life, and still it was enough for me to understand. 

For it was because of what you were saying, and only you and I know why that is. Across all I have forgotten and all I do not wish to remember, I can distincly recall all I have ever written to you across these ten years. You were only nine when you picked up the call and said surprise, Ada taught me to read! and I remember asking you to pass the phone to your father so I could give him hell for waiting that long — I had thought you were illiterate till you were nine! Developed country, my arse! And then you told me that you meant Malayalam, because my English is so terrible (ow!) and then you and I started writing to each other. It was funny, wasn't it? How your Ada thought you were so keen on such a linguistic education because you wanted to read all his old favourite children's books, only for you to never look twice at them even. 

I told you stories about your father and uncle, the Party, your terrible set of great-uncles, the antics we seven got up to. I told you stories of the biggest pain in my arse (my dear brother Celegorm) like the time he went on a faux-pilgrimage to Guruvayur, where they had an array of temple-elephants, and tried to learn "whatever language elephants speak". And how when I found out they smelt the ruse and gave him the beating he deserved right there before god and man, I personally called the temple devaswom board and told them to get in a few extra kicks for me.

I told you about Finrod's collection of bigger and bigger bulldogs, and Maglor's apprentice Lindir, who tried to strangle a colleague over a broken sitar string, with the string itself. I told you about Elrond and Elros and their horrible, malfunctioning cat, with its stupid name. Rusty, it was like naming something Rotten, or like standing out at your doorstep every evening and calling out public embarassment, public embarassment, it's time for dinner! I remember how funny you found that one, you even mentioned it on the phone! 

The world rearranges itself after every shattering, shuffles its deck, and once again I am helpless to understand the new order of things. Where will I keep these stories now, hm? The afternoons and mornings we spent in one another’s lives, a pocketful of each other’s days coming through by first class post each month. We turned the most mundane mundanities into legend, did we not? And now all these stories are rattling around inside my head like undreamed dreams. Who will I tell them to now, Arwen? When Celegorm inevitably gets arrested again for naming a dog Indira Gandhi, who will I write to?

And you told me stories too, story after story that slowly filled up the holes in time that were left in me by those years in prison, and made coming back into my life all the more bearable, the way I could not bring myself to speak to your father for longer than ten minutes at a time. You told me of how he can never resist badgering animals at the zoo, how he got his fingers savaged by an ostrich as a result (well deserved!). How you and your mother rebelled against his (draconian!) nutritional policies by being even more dictatorial with it, whilst making illicit trips to the ice-cream shop, just the two of you, until he himself began sneaking sweets behind your backs. 

I think that one was my idea, wasn't it? I knew all the best ways to annoy Elrond, didn't I? 

And then you grew older, and your questions probed deeper. Your father (and Elros, when that miscreant was visiting you all) would talk the talk and discuss the freedom struggles all around the world and the Quit India movement and insurrections and revolution but refuse to tell you what it all meant. And so you asked me. And who better than I, no? Who better than Comrade Maedhros, who threw a homemade bomb at some bastard on a horse and made it so he had one less finger to scratch his arse with, to tell you about the world of revolution. Who better indeed than I to prepare someone for the ways in which everyone in this world will be betrayed by their own country at some point in their lives.

Were you afraid, Arwen, on that last evening? You must have been afraid. I remember the day we got the news, and oh my girl. Till today I am glad it was Maglor who picked that call up, for I know it would have put an end to me, like seeing that newspaper headline nearly did. And then we sat together, he and I, and at some point my brother shakes his head and says — "why would she have done that? She would have known the fire wouldn't… it wouldn't melt the statue. Why would she have done that?" He was trying to think of a reason, see, some external influence. For Elrond had been ranting and raving on the phone that morning, high on whatever sedative they had him on, and in that state of mind he… it was just like Maglor, after Elros. 

Remember that, Arwen? When Elros passed, left those motherless infants fatherless too, you were only what, fourteen? You had no reason at all to know that everyone from Maglor to your father to even Fingon, even my Fingon, had silently put that death on the head of Maedhros Fëanorian. I saw it in all their faces, heard it in all their voices — it was the good Comrade who had pushed him towards the more incendiary wing of the Party, it was I who stoked the fire and sent him after the Opposition, it was I who told him to take a more aggressive stance. He had been so promising, they would say. He could have changed the world. Prime Minister Tar Minyatur. None of them had been wrong: they knew both I and Elros too well for it to have been wrong. Still, it was everywhere, day in and day out, from the Party to inside my house, because the life I live allows no separation between myself and the Party. And then your letter came.

Only fourteen you were, and you had no clue because I know your father would never have mentioned such a thing to you – that Elros' death had been added to your grandfather's charge-sheet in the minds of even those who love him. And you wrote me a letter where you told me how sorry you are, how you cannot imagine such a loss. You had translated for me an English book on grief, you had asked me to take some time away from the Party, you had even made a list, in your hand, a list of beautiful sites across the country that you thought I should go to, for a little while, to unshatter. Because I had lost my son too. 

It is strange to think of the things that will now outlive you. Like your English translation of grief, or that letter you wrote to me the month Elros died. Or your father asleep before me, or I myself, or my father's crossed-swords above my head. None of the things on this porch at this moment should outlive you. And your present — the present I was to have sent you in just a fortnight, the surprise present. It wasn't anything large, none of our little gifts to each other ever were. It's something I am certain your father could have bought you in a blink. But as you know, money doesn't go as far here, and so I had put aside little bits, here and there, for around a year or so before I finally bought it. It is Eid, as you know, a week after your birthday. I would always send you a present, along with an extra long letter. 

And I can't give the present to you, I know, but I can't bring myself to throw it away either, Arwen, because that would mean I have to look at it. And perhaps if I don't look at it then it would still be my birthday present to you, as long as I don't take it out of the old drawer, and it would mean that I can outrun the fact that you will never get it. Do you know what I mean? The knowledge of certain things, knowledge you carry in your body, knowledge you dread truly looking at because it would make the repressed thing real. So the present, and this letter, will sit in a drawer, termites feasting like corrosion on bronze shields.

I know why you lit that fire. They had refused to take down the statue. There was no other grain, was there? 

A story is a sea of stars. I knew this, or perhaps I didn't, but I certainly did not think, when I told you these stories, about how each sea in our world is linked to all others — 10th standard flunky as I was! Every story has layers, hidden air pockets, shadowy depths and murky edges, and every story has a thousand endings and a thousand ways to make things, people, drown, disappear. I had not known how stories change when sent across the border. 

I keep doing it, even here. 

I keep telling you new stories to avoid looking at the old ones, the ones that must sit in your drawer even today, the stories that made you light that fire. But yes, you got older, and you wanted to know the other stories, the stories of what nations do to people, even their own. And I told you, and you took them in, didn't you? You began addressing your letters to Comrade Achachan, Comrade Grandad, instead of just your achachan. And I let you do it because it made me feel as though the Comrade and I were one person, as if it were all me, instead of two separate people crushed together by circumstance. Comrade Achachan and his little revolutionary, crushed under the steel-capped boot of circumstance. 

It was one of the first real stories I told you, the grain story, and I remember every word — as did you, I realise.

Have you heard of ergot madness, Arwen? It happened here, when the grain rotted and the famine began, in Bengal mostly but here too, and Churchill had commanded much of the stores of grain we had left be sent to England to help with hunger across the sea. People resisted, of course, my father being one. And then the British began publishing stories in the local papers about ergot poisoning, a natural, snail-driven poisoning of rye. 

Imagine this: you’re a farmer, barely scraping by, eating bread from the same fields that give you life. But one day, someone you trust tells you that something in the grain has gone wrong. Rotten it becomes, infested by snails that secrete some horrific toxin. It was rare. It did not happen here, did not happen to our fields, you say.

But even when your grain itself isn’t touched, you start to feel it creeping up your spine—your hands trembling, your mind racing. You hear stories of those who succumb and you are terrified to eat your own grain. You see colours where there are none, hear voices in fire. Then the real terror begins. You claw at your skin, sure it’s crawling with something. You run, scream, fall. Some die starving; others are left hollow, unable to remember who they were.  

Churchill had been a clever man — a war hero himself, he had known the truth. Fear is the only religion men like him believe in, because men like him knew that there is no barbed fence, national border nor passport more impermeable than the one constructed by a frightened pysche. There had not been a single case of grain poisoning in the British Raj. 

That’s what it was like, Arwen, a famine under the boot. Every mouthful, every moment, tainted by something unseen. Some days I’d go cold inside, distant from my own body. Other days, I was frantic, lashing out at anyone nearby, lashing out at my own self, desperate to feel real. And always, always, that poison coursing through the air, turning us into something we could hardly recognise. But we either kept eating the grain we had, or we starved. What else could we do? There was no other grain.

Did I turn us into legend, Arwen? Did it all sound like one infinitely exciting lineage, did revolution boil your blood through jailhouse-songs as it did mine? For my stories to you changed from Finrod and his bulldogs as a comic side-tangent, to the story of Finrod whose wife was set upon by police dogs for the crime of going to the wrong market-place, Finrod who raised those vicious dogs as an act of quiet, retributory terror. The whole of human history is an archive of undeserved fame and forgotten names, I told you. Names like my father, I told you. 

And then I told you of my father, the artist, whose works were thrown in a salt-pool when I was twelve years old. I told you that he turned into a terrorist when I was twelve years old, but that I only became one at sixteen. For that was the year when Fëanor took himself to the British sepoy’s headquarters, after another unfair shipment of grain was taken from us. And that was the year he called for a rally right there, and forbade us all from going to it, except me. I had to go with him, he said, for I was the oldest. I was the one who would carry on his work, though the work has changed from bronze to beating. So I went along, and stood there watching as my father stood at the stairs to the town hall, gave the speech of a lifetime. He had been tired and everything had been taken from him and he could not be swept along by choicelessness and so he gave the best speech of his life. 

Dogs, he called them. Dogs, at the final stage of rabies, suffering and dying and so turning upon the world. An Empire run by dogs, he said, and when they raised their guns to order him down, he poured a can of petrol over his head and lit himself on fire, because there was no other grain. It was a spectacular sight, meant to arrest motion, leave all those around him in a fugue, trance-like state — not smoke and mirrors but smoke-as-mirror, forcing every witness to see themselves in the destruction. 

Look at me. What have you done to me? said the fire wearing my father’s face. Look! Look at what you have done to me. 

I hope one day you will find it in yourself to forgive your grandfather, the rot inside this man that he passes down with every story he tells. Rot has no past, present and future, I realise now. Rot will forever persist in the seams. Rot possesses. And all this to what end? For which cause? Because at the end of the day, Maedhros Fëanorian is not even a true revolutionary: this too is a task at which the good Comrade has failed. He would have taken it all back, damned his country and all who live within it, had he known it would come to this. Had he known what they would do to you. Can you forgive me, Arwen?

Were you afraid, Arwen?

Your father used to be terrified of the dark. But because he was a twin, whenever his brother would clamour to go sleep outside, he would go as well. And Elros, bless him, made a habit of teasing his brother — he'd not let anyone else tease him, as you know, but had that boy found out Elrond was afraid of the dark he would have tattooed it on his chest. So I would go out in the dark and lay beside him on the very platform he sleeps upon now. I would tell him to count my heartbeats, show him the way to navigate such bleak, loud darkness. Count along, I would say. Count until it is light again, if you must. For that, my girl, is another thing I had been an expert in. I have lived long years in darkness, as you know. 

As you know. I have used that phrase so often in this incoherent, rambling letter, I realise. Oh Arwen, I realise that you know more of me than most ever will. You know of me beyond Comrade Maedhros, the self-important minor politician and the unrepentant terrorist, you, Arwen, you who learned a whole new language when you realised your grandfather was not so good at your language. It was rare, Arwen, that someone wished to know me in that way — someone who wished to know me beyond the rage and failure and solitude and all the narrow boundaries of the short words that define me. 

But I never told you that story, did I? I never told you of your father pressed to my chest, counting the beats of my heart, and how one day he stopped being so frightened. One day, he learned how to live with the dark, or at least make his own way through it. I showed him how to do that. I had the key, you see, the way to carry darkness without letting it swallow you whole, how to carry it close without being crushed by its weight. I could have told you that story too. 

Perhaps then, I would not be sitting in the dark now watching my boy, whose face I will now never know unshattered. I would not be sitting here as afraid as Elrond had ever been of the dark, terrified that when my son opens his eyes at daybreak, he will look at me and he will know, and in his eyes I will see that he hates me.

For the words you spoke upon that stage were my words, were they not? Some of them down to the pauses. It was my rage you channeled, was it not? The stories Maedhros the terrorist told you were the stories you told them, the stories they turned a blind eye to your burning for. Comrade Achachan and his little revolutionary: the wound cannot exist without a knife, the knife without a thing to maim. 

If only I had told you the story of your Ada’s fear of the dark. You must have been so frightened. On that final evening, when you felt that there was no other grain. You were frightened in the dark, and you were alone. And your father too, out there in the dark outside, he too had been alone. If only I had told you that story. If only you had my heartbeat to count. 

To this day, the clearest image of you in my mind is not the frightened child in the dark, nor is it the firebrand on the podium. No, it is the girl who asked her father to teach her how to read Malayalam at nine years old — just so she could write to a grandfather she never even set eyes upon. You reached out a hand across the continent so unconsciously, an action the vast majority of people would never even consider, let alone do so unprompted. You looked at the world and its cold, beyond-argument borders and said, this will not do, scattered geographic coordinates to the wind like chicken feed. You looked at the idea of two people who love each other being unable to exchange words from the heart, and you said this is not enough.

And the last thing you must know is this: you were all the goodness left in me. I gave it to you as selflessly as you gave me my words, and you paid me back with a universe. So let me tell you, my girl, the story of the universe you have laid at my feet. The one I can see even now, dawnlight tracing my sleeping son, the two of us alone on this porch and alone in this world. The world you have given me is all that keeps me from despairing at the sight and the solitude. 

After the ending of this vicious chapter of history, somewhere beyond the futures that we deserve and the futures that we will receive, there will be a world in which Maedhros Fëanorian is an artist, and Arwen Undómiel is his grandchild, and neither of them will be terrorists. It will be a world in which there are no sea-monsters in ships, no bombs, no taken children, no burning trains. There would be no despite in the words through which our family loves one another. There would be grain for us all. 

Can you picture it, Arwen? Waking from this life and entering the other world, and realising that it is a better world. Most things there will be unfamiliar, I think, for the natives of this world are not used to soft edges. But there will also be a vague familiarity, and we’ll start to recognise the new shape of old things, old friends and family crowding back into our hearts and still it will be a different world, a better world. And in it we will all be different and better, some of us so much so that it will feel like a dream or a prayer, unsubstantial and perpetually at risk of being taken away. 

Forgive me, Arwen, for telling you only the shadow-stained stories of our world. I did not tell you of ways forward, of the planting of new grain, the dismantling of cruel laws. I did not remind you that no calamity has ever broken the spirit of us, the human race, who have endured so much and more. I did not tell my granddaughter that for all that is bitter in the world, there is still song and sculpture and art, and I did not show her how she can yet find bliss in humanity’s defiant designs. 

No future is certain, I know this, and no world is stable. I know such things more than most, and I have told you this more than most. But some things are certain, I can feel them in my bones. The other world, the one you have brought, is not a future I will take lightly or for granted, it is one I will fight for with all that is left within me. For that world is the one in which you and I will meet at last. There, you will receive this birthday present, and all the others for the dozens of birthdays to come. For in that world, my little revolutionary, you will outlive us all. 

With love and solidarity,

Comrade Achachan 

The Birthday Present:

Chapter Text

“Elladan, I am giving you express permission to use whichever form of violence you prefer, and get your uncle awake in the next ten seconds before I turn the garden hose on him,” is the first thing Elrond hears, half-awake with the sun glowing red behind his eyelids and smoke curling into his nose in a way that sets his heart thudding, even now. 

He knows that voice. He knows the hose threat. He is, clearly, still asleep and dreaming. “Ten in the morning and sleeping as if he’s the Queen of England. When I die, I tell you Elladan, either that Celegorm or sleeping beauty here will be the reason Marx kicks me out of heaven and straight to hell.”

Elrond absolutely knows that voice, and the hearty conviction that the owner of said voice appears to have, of the possibility of ending up in heaven even temporarily — despite a decades-long career of doling out public thrashings for crimes such as 'looked at me for too long during election season' and 'being named Finarfin'. His heart slows down, realising the smoke was from a handrolled cigarette, not… well. And absolutely nobody except this one person genuinely, hand-on-heart thinks that Karl Marx has anything to do with the ruling political party of heaven, or that heaven is ruled not by God and his angels but rather by a democratically elected socialist party. The good Comrade seems to have, by all accounts, come home to roost. 

“Can I bite him?”

“No, no. You’re a clever boy, aren’t you? You know you’ll catch some disease, you know they had plague in his country every Tuesday for two hundred years. Did you know they don't even wash their a… never mind. I have things to do, you go get him up now. Remember what I taught you, when it’s a bigger boy, always use a tool — find your cricket bat. Go for the kneecaps, try and get both in one shot.”

“For god’s sake, I’m awake!” Elrond sits up, brushing his hair off his face. Elladan glares at him.

“You did that on purpose!” he exclaims, looking supremely disappointed. “You heard him allowing me to beat you, and you woke up on purpose! You’re really mean, and all this after you stole our girlfriend!”

“That's my wife, you underfed porcupine. Of course I woke up on purpose! What was I to do, lie there and let you play whack-a-mole on my knees?”

“What is a mole?" Elladan asks, interested at last in something Elrond has to say. "Such a nice English word! Mole. Mole! Why do you beat it? Are they religious fundamentalists? Can I beat it too?” 

“There is no such thing as a mole. Stop making up animals, he’s just a child,” the gruff voice commands him from the corner, and though the Professor Peredhel in Elrond very much wants to prove the fact that moles did indeed exist as well as question Elladan as to why he knows the phrase religious fundamentalist but refuses to read anything longer than three letters and a question mark, the Maedhros’ Son in him knows full well that his father would bury him alive before conceding that moles are not a figment of Elrond’s imagination. His Baba has always been ridiculously stubborn. 

He looks over, blinks, stammers. “I… what are you… what are you doing here?”

“Did someone die and leave you this house?” his father narrows his eyes at him. “Last I know, my Baba built it brick-by-brick, and the deed is in my name. Unless you have come here to conquer for your Queen, in which case, alhamdulillah, thank god, there will be beatings for breakfast. You want me to pay rent in my own bloody house, ratfucker? Please, step outside and I’ll show the twins what I do to usurping landlords.”

Of course it would be this anticlimatic, because Elrond's father does not live and die by the rules of the world, let alone the rules of polite society. Of course his first words for him would be something ridiculous, like there is no such thing as a mole and of course he would call him a ratfucker in the first five minutes. And of course he would say exactly what he says next:

"You have one of those fancy English cameras, Celegorm says, in one of the rare moments he remembers he has eyes," he points at his son. "I'm doing my campaign rounds today, this election is the first one after the Emergency, so it needs to fuck every other election senseless. I need photographs of the party workers doing things that are not beating people. You will be coming."

"Don't you have a Party photographer?" 

"Will you sell him your fancy camera? No? You will be coming," Maedhros has his don't-ask-questions face on, snaps his fingers. "Are you sleeping on the porch like this? In your boxers? Besharaam, shameless! Put some clothes on! Can you not afford clothes? Maglor has truly let this become a madhouse. Oh, also, boy, your gay called me last week, asking some protesting advice. Apparently your gay it seems, he will be calling me tomorrow also. Did you know he called me?" 

Elrond frowns, pulling on his shorts, understandably reeling at the cigarette smoke, flurry of both questions and information that he had not asked for, as well as being hit full in the face with the more manic aspects of his father’s personality he had forgotten about when pining for the man. "No, no. I didn't. What advice? Wait, my what called you?" 

"You have so few friends, is it, that you sound so surprised?" Maedhros raises his beetling brows, still jet-black in startling contrast to his henna-red hair. "Do you have no friends in England? Is it because of your strange behaviour? I told you when you were five itself, you should stop scratching your head when you get nervous, people will think you have lice. Now see, you have no friends. You know even monkeys raised by humans make monkey friends at some point. Such a shame to see you cannot. Although perhaps it's better to have no friends than to have this gay." 

"That's an offensive and frankly rather abnormal way to talk about someone, Baba.” 

"Are you calling me abnormal? Why? Because I am a friend of gays?" Maedhros glares at him. "And what the hell are you wearing? You can’t go out in your boxers, are you insane? Look, even the children are wearing longer trousers than you are!” 

“These are shorts,” Elrond flushes deeply as Elladan cackles away. “They’re perfectly normal to wear outside, I’ve been wearing them for the last two months, and not the same pair before you start on that.”

“What? Walking about in public wearing chaddi shorts like a five year old? Get some proper trousers on, I caught a disease in prison and I cannot be around you when you’re dressed like that. Or don’t you care about your father’s health?”

“What disease?” Elrond narrows his eyes, grabbing a towel from the hook Maglor had kindly put up for him after he decided to take up a public-facing bedroom. 

“Incurable,” Maedhros shakes his head sadly. “Kneecapfucker disease. See, even has an English term. Only one symptom. Every time I see some skinny fucker’s hairy kneecaps, I have to shatter them on sight.” 

"You are a menace, ikka. And which friend of Elrond’s is calling you?" Maglor laughs at his son’s muttered swearing as he went off to shower. He walks out from the house, handing off a mug of tea to Maedhros and simultaneously nudging Elladan in the back with his foot. “You, monkey, upstairs! Books exist, start reading!”  

"The gay. I said already, no?”

"The…" Maglor sputters, coughing. “The what?”

"Write your will before you cough yourself to death," Maedhros commands casually, sitting back in the easy-chair. “So anti-gay you are, Maglor. It’s a normal English word. Astagfirullah, bachelorhood has made you a homophobic. You don’t know it? I learned it last week. Maybe your one year in England was a waste of money. A gay means a homosexual. See that? Flunked out of school and I know more English words than you.” 

“Do you mean that Oxford Professor? Gil-galad?” Maglor asks, horrified. “Ikka, you cannot just go around calling people a gay! Not even if you’re gay yourself!” 

“You better not be calling me a gay," Maedhros taps his foot testily. Maglor gives up, raises his hands in supplication. 

“Ikka, listen. I have to talk to you.”

“What? About the election? Or about Elrond?” 

“Neither, though I am quite worried that you’re just… taking him out like this. After all that from the last couple of months, you’re just turning up here and taking him on your rounds. You both need to talk properly.” 

“Have I asked you for advice?” Maedhros runs cold again, words icy. “We’ll talk when we talk. If not this, then what’s the problem, Maglor?”

Maglor looks around, sees Elladan scampering up the stairs after pretending not to eavesdrop. “Can you come back around in the evening? After your rounds maybe? Fingon dropped your bike off, so I assume he’ll need picking up. Maybe then, when the boys are sleeping?”

“All right, Maglor — they’re doing the electoral speeches at the square this evening, but Fingon can handle that,” Maedhros makes a note in his pocket calendar. “We’ll talk in the evening, no problem.”

“Thank you, ikka,” Maglor smiles. “And please don’t toss my son off your bike when he starts whining about you going too fast.”  

“Bike? Maedhros, what exactly…” Elrond starts, freshly showered and most definitely not wearing shorts any longer. His father looks up, and Maglor bites back a smile at the reaction he knows Maedhros would give him. 

“Call me by my name once more and I will knock your teeth out. Were you raised by Maglor and his pet donkey? That country has made you so damn disrespectful, your mother was right. Who is Maedhros, hm? Your dog?” 

Elrond wants to sink into the floor. His mother? 

“Sorry, Baba,” he says, feeling childish and, in consequence, churlish. "However, I am not riding pillion on your motorcycle on your campaign rounds, I have at least a little care and consideration for my own life."

“Sisterfucker, will you be buying me a luxury sports car tomorrow then?” Maedhros pays no heed to his protestations, instead shoving a somewhat battered helmet into his son’s hands. “Maglor, tell the twins! Queen Elizabeth here will be bringing home a Mercedes tomorrow, his personal gift to the poor bastards that raised him. Tell the neighbours also, Kuriakose next door has been looking for something to tie his new cow to when he’s milking it.” 

"Doesn't Fingon have a car?" Elrond protests, backing away from the contraption. “And why are you still riding that thing at your age anyway, you should be retiring soon, shouldn’t you, not zipping about on the same motorbike you took us to school on!” 

“Oh, now you’ve done it,” Maglor pats him on the back with the air of seeing off a corpse. “Farewell, my son, you’re not coming back into this house in one piece.” 

“Oh, Maglor, call the twins down,” Maedhros ignores his son completely, waving his hand airily at his brother. “Let them come along, they’ll enjoy it. And they can watch as I beat their uncle's head in the next time he calls me old."

“Absolutely not, their school reopens next week, I’m not letting them gallivant about with you on your rounds.” 

“Eh, why not?” Maedhros sucks his teeth, struggling with the clutch, snapping fingers to instruct Elrond to hop on. Which he does, because of course he does. “Let them have some fun once in a while. Elrohir once offered me his brother’s kidney if I’d let him watch me thrash someone. And I’m stopping at bloody Celeborn’s today so there will probably be some thrashing. Go, call them down!”

“Maedhros,” Maglor is sharp all of a sudden, not using the honorific and walking down the front steps towards his brother and his bike, lowering his voice. “This is exactly what I need to talk to you about. One rule, ikka. You know I have one rule with you. Don’t cross it.” 

“As you wish,” Maedhros rolls his eyes, finally getting the bike started with a vigorous kick. “Elrond, hold on. If you fall off, I’ll leave you to die to spare me the embarrassment.” 

“Those with revolution in their blood must march with the Communists, hand on the heart and hand on the flag. Let the reactionaries bring on their fire, let the landlord class try their tricks. We’ll strike you down, we’ll torch your house, we’ll drive you out into the sea!”

It is late afternoon, and Elrond reluctantly finds himself enjoying the spectacle of Maedhros standing upon the roof of Celegorm’s jeep for the sixth time that day. His father obviously doesn’t involve him in the violence, but instead plays it up across the day — the Comrade through and through. And he’d even gotten the chance to reunite with Finarfin, from a distance, as he tried to elbow his Baba in the face. But Elrond, as irritated as he is at the speed at which Maedhros throws himself around on his bike and the fact that his father definitely should not be doing all of this at his age, feels as if he’s lived through a whole day, instead of little scraps of moments strung together as he’d done for the last. What? A year. Trust the man to pull something like this instead of weeping on each other's shoulders in a coffee shop after a long nature ramble, pastimes Elrond enjoyed and Maedhros would send himself back to jail to avoid.

“WE’LL STRIKE YOU DOWN,” Maedhros throws out a flag at the throng, urging them to repeat after him, which as always, they do, because the man was over six foot tall and had loose, wild red hair and looked like a fire with legs and frankly you’d repeat after him too. “After me! That’s right, good! WE WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN, TORCH YOUR HOUSE, DRIVE YOU OUT INTO THE SEA!” 

“Such words from a sexual deviant!” calls out a man after the crowd starts to dissipate, blue-shirted and smug. An opposition member, Elrond supposes, his equally oily friend laughing away beside him, clearly new to the political scene as they seemed to be completely unaware of why Maedhros' intimate life was simultaneously mysterious and an open secret, namely due to what Maedhros did to people who mentioned said intimate life in his hearing. “Fancy a degenerate telling people of progress!” 

“What did you say to me, sisterfucker?” Maedhros turns off the loudspeaker and jumps off the Jeep, effortlessly dodging the blow the blue-clad man’s friend aimed at him. He shoots a gleefully predatory grin at him, like a wolf on Bakr-eid spotting a goat fattened for the slaughter and forgotten in the pasture. “Oho, brave boy, trying to hit someone your father’s age, are you? What is it? Did I batter your Baba’s balls too hard last time he tried to fuck with me? Come here, I’ll show you degeneracy.”

Elrond watches, eyebrows raised and somewhat mesmerised, as Maedhros ducks a second blow, mutters a quick bismillah as if he were thanking the lord for providing him with a meal, grabs a short plank from the jeep and sets about cheerfully making good on his threat. It’s strangely compelling, to be truthful, watching Maedhros stand atop vehicles with flags, making borderline-arrestable speeches and battering people for breakfast: he seems far too elegant, far too ensconced in his element, like all this is simply muscle memory. There’s a certain effortless grace to it too — it’s almost like watching a particularly vicious ballet performed by tigers. 

And then, still laughing, Maedhros turns to hit the second man and for a split second, his eyes meet Elrond’s. And Elrond knows those eyes better than he knows his own, knows them better than anyone in the world knows them. And even after all these years Maedhros’ eyes ask what else can I do? This is all I know. This is the shape I was poured into, the only shape I know. 

Even here, his father’s eyes are not cruel, but questioning. Not asking for forgiveness but a space to stand. Timid, almost, like he has lived all his life braced for impact only to find stillness terrifying. It is almost like watching two people, Elrond realises: the hand that batters, and the eyes that ask. The eyes that ask his hand, what comes next? and the eyes which ask his son can you see me as something besides the sum of my ruin? Do you love me? Can you? Can you love me even so?

He glances across to Celegorm when the latter pinches his elbow. Hard. 

"How are you still doing that at your age?" he hisses. “Are you six?” 

“Oho, look at your face, nephew! You missed watching this, I bet, hm?”

“Well, no, it’s less that I missed him beating people up and more that I’m genuinely quite impressed he’s managing to do this at his age,” Elrond raises his eyebrows even higher as Maedhros bodily lifts up a third, smaller man and slams him against the jeep. “I mean, he doesn’t look too much older than when I last saw him, but I’d have thought the ability to do, er, that, would have eroded through the years.” 

“Oh, no no, it’s the opposite with my dear brother,” Celegorm gives a low whistle, distracted by the action once again. “Ha, just look at that, he took that second bastard out in a single hook. Anyway, no, no, he’s probably gotten better at it across the last couple of decades. What is prison if not a postgraduate course in thrashing people? Well, as you know they let him out after serving four years of ten, because he was such a good student. Battered people and enjoyed himself so much, they had to let him out before he started a riot because he was bored or something."

“Well, I’m glad he’s learned something there at least,” Elrond’s eyebrows almost disappear into his hairline as Maedhros drags the first man by the ear across to the tree, orders him to climb it. He cannot help a shout of sudden laughter. “What on earth is he doing? Why is he sending that one up into the mango tree? And then…”

The unfortunate man shimmies back down the tree with an inexplicable mango in his hand, tries to do a runner, only for Maedhros to grab him, forcing him into a sitting position and ordering him to do something that Elrond cannot make out. The man, who now has pure resignation lathered across his face, starts to eat the fruit. 

Elrond blinks. “Did he just… ask that fellow to climb the mango tree, get a mango, climb back down, and then to eat it?” 

“Seems to be the case, yes,” Celegorm nods appreciatively. “One of his more creative finishing flourishes, I’m genuinely quite impressed.”

“But… why?” Elrond asks weakly. 

“Oh, I don’t know why Maedhros does anything, probably because he can,” Celegorm shrugs. “Effective, though. Put it this way, if I was a political cadre in the prime of my youth who just tried to heckle and then hit a man older than my father, and said man older than my father just beat me within an inch of my life, then asked me to climb a mango tree, get a mango and eat the mango, believe me when I say I’ll be eating that mango like it’s the last mango on earth. I'd fuck the mango if he asked me to fuck it. Sometimes I think our dear Comrade refuses to go for a national or even state parliamentary seat simply because he likes the ‘beating people’ aspect of local politics a little too much.”

“Well that, and the fact that Baba as an MP would turn every parliamentary session into open trench warfare," Elrond points out, before wrinkling his nose. "Did you have to be so forthcoming with the fact that you’d fuck a mango if someone threatened to beat you up again?”

“I didn’t say that, I said I’d fuck a mango if Maedhros-ikka threatened to beat me up again.”

“I should thrash you for even thinking that, kandarolli-thamaramyran,” Maedhros, having just finished tormenting the heckler, walks over to Celegorm, using his general term of endearment for his middle brother. “When in my life did I ever ask you to fuck a mango?” 

[Translator's Note: The term myran directly translates to pubic hair in Malayalam, and is colloquially used with a similar intended meaning to fucker or cunt. Kandarolli has no direct translation to English, but can be read as one who fucks anything that moves. The suffix thamara translates to lotus-flower, and has no linguistic explanation aside from the fact that Maedhros Fëanorian has always appreciated a degree of flamboyance to his lexicon of obscenities.]

Maedhros hands off the flag to Celegorm, gives him a set of instructions, and then turns back to his son, who was again wincing at the smoke from his cigarette. “Elrond, on the bike now, please. We’re going home, the Library that is — I need to be there, but I need you to head to the square with Fingon afterwards — the MP candidate is going to give the address.”

“Who is it, out of curiosity?” Elrond asks as Maedhros winds down backroads, the bike thankfully slower as the comrade tries to not aggravate his own injuries from the day of thrashing and being thrashed. “The candidate. I assume it’s not Celegorm?”

“Astagfirullah, god forbid,” he feels Maedhros shudder. “Celegorm is not a parliamentarian, Celegorm is humanity’s third testicle. He has the face of someone who regularly gets blowjobs from fish. No, it’s Celebrimbor. Remember him? Curufin’s boy. They live hours away, in Kakkanad, but he moved to Malapuzham nearby when he got married, and is quite popular.”

“Celebrimbor?” scoffs Elrond, utterly aghast. Not at the fact that it was a family member — politics in India has, of course, always been family business right to the top. More the fact that it was Celebrimbor. “Him? What, a CPIM MP? Baba, he’ll get thrashed!”

“Not if I have a say,” Maedhros says shortly, parking the bike and heading up to their porch. “And, as you just saw, I have more than enough say. Now, your Abba has told me to stay here and discuss some business with him. I need you to take photos of Celebrimbor’s speech, in the entirety, they’ll use it in the Comms office. Hand it off to Fingon, he’ll be there also. Can you do that?” 

“All right, I can, but… stuttering Celebrimbor? Kaykay-kello?” he uses the boy’s rather cruel childhood nickname that his much older cousin Elros had bestowed upon him. “That’s your candidate for this monumental election? They’ll eat him alive!”

Maedhros spins to face Elrond, giving him the evil eye. “I told your brother the same as I tell you now. Call him that again and I’ll give you what for. Understand?” 

“Sorry,” Elrond flushes, embarrassed. “I hadn’t meant it like that. My Arwen had a stutter too.”

A muscle jumps in Maedhros’ jaw, and he lights another cigarette. 

“It’s fine,” he says, looks off into the distance. “Don’t worry. I know what you meant. But listen, give Celebrimbor a chance. He still stutters, and quite severely too! Like Comrade EMS Namboodiripad. But that Celebrimbor — he’s one of the best speakers I’ve seen. Holds a room perfectly. And he’s what we need. Not the party, but the election. Nobody would call him a…”

He trails off, clenches his teeth. 

"Can you put that out, please?" Elrond asks suddenly, looking mildly nauseous. He's pointing at the roll-up between Maedhros' fingers. 

Maedhros ignores him. "Baba. Churuttu — your cigarette. Put it out, please. You've chained three in a row since we started." 

Maedhros clicks his teeth, rolls his eyes. "Shut it, Gandhiji. What's your problem? I've been smoking in the damn womb and I've been smoking on this porch since before you were a double-egg or double-sperm or whatever your people are created from. You didn't have a problem until now. I don't care about whatever health effects you are going to pipe up with, and don't tell me what to do under my own damn roof. As I told Celegorm and his flu last time he came around, that's not my problem, suck it up or go elsewhere and shove your face in a flower's asshole."

"It's not that, I smoked too, until —" Elrond gags slightly, wincing as he presses a hand to his mouth. "It's fine, I'll just go ins—" 

Maedhros frowns, leaning forward in his chair. "Hey. Elrond. What's with you? I’ve smoked around you for… hey, careful. Are you actually going to be sick?”

"Nothing Baba, I said it's fine —" he heaves again, but manages to settle himself. “It’s fine. I’ll go in.” 

His father stares at him for a moment, frowning in confusion; then pales, leaping out of his chair like a tiger and rushing to the opposite end of the garden. He stubs out the cigarette under a tree, crushes it under his slipper with the manic urgency he devotes to everything he does. Washes his hands under the tap in the yard and wrings them dry before, still with that feverish quickness, grabbing the ashtray from the porch, blinking at it for a long moment like he didn't know what to do, before reflexively throwing it with the same energy he put into brick-chucking. The plate sails halfway to the next field and Maedhros watches it go before turning to his son.

"Sorry, boy," he looks stricken, putting a hand on his heart. "Sorry, I really am. Baba didn't think."

Elrond doesn't know what it is, really: the entire almost-slapstick performance he'd just watched unfold, the look of genuine horror in Maedhros' eyes when he put two and two together, the apologetic tone very, very few people have ever heard from the good comrade, the third-person apology that came so naturally to parents, Ada's sorry he made you eat your peas, Arwen, and Mummy's sorry she let you hide them under the plate, or how drastically different this seems from the man who spent the entire day happily pounding people into the dirt. Or perhaps, and this is more likely, it's the way he just called him boy. 

He'd been calling him boy all day, of course, and boy in Malayalam is a catch-all, see, with several ways to say one thing. But all day, Maedhros had used the word chekka, the informal you, boy, something he’d call anyone from someone he was thrashing to someone he'd never met. This time, he'd used the word mone, gentler, like he used with Elladan earlier (though far be it from Elrond to ever admit he was even momentarily jealous of his ridiculous six-year old nephew), which was closer to the lines of son. Whatever it is, he feels a sudden rush of affection for his father, who was still standing there looking as though he'd personally stabbed Elrond and made a runner. 

"I'll quit tomorrow," he snaps his fingers as was his way, swift decisions and swifter words. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the wad of tobacco, and as Elrond starts to laugh, hurls it in the same direction he'd hurled the ashtray. He looks over, hearing the laughter, relief clear on his features. 

“Listen, at least this time I didn’t throw up all over myself,” Elrond winks, resorting to the pastime he shared with his father: gallows humour. “Always a silver lining. And for god’s sake, Baba. You don’t have to quit.”

Maedhros comes back up into the porch, slaps Elrond’s shoulder lightly, giving him a small smile. “Too late. Already happened. Watch me. Have I ever broken my word? Now, as an ex-smoker, I must give you a lecture on…”

Elrond laughs aloud. “Ah, maybe I should start panicking at all your terrible vices, Baba. Wish the thought came to me earlier when you came THIS close to biting poor Fingolfin.”

“Well, the man claims he has a Masters degree from some university even Allah has never heard of,” Maedhros snorts. “I thought it would be funny to bite him, tell him he’d catch tenth-standard flunky disease now. But I refrained, as you saw.” 

Elrond stands in thoughtful silence for some time, as if balancing a sum in his head. 

"You didn't, though," he murmurs at last, near imperceptibly. "Did you?”

“Did I what? Bite him? No, I told you, I only considered it.”

“No, I meant flunked out of school.”

"What, you think I grew wings, flew over to Oxford every night and got myself a PhD?" 

"I didn't say you did."

"You want to see my school withdrawal slip, is it, Professor?" Maedhros snaps, face tightening. "You want the rubber stamp also?" 

"I didn't say you didn't leave school," there is a quiet intensity to it, like there is to most things with Elrond. "You'd read us stories every night. Literature, not stories. Malayalam translations of revolutionary poetry, passages from epics." 

"Yes, and so what? You think I need a damned degree to be able to speak Malayalam? Or what, you're saying I can't read? Maybe where you come from, but here —" 

"I'm not saying you have a degree, and nor am I claiming that your English is anything better than shite-coated-shite, don't worry. And I'm certainly not saying you can't read," Elrond laughs softly. "You know, just because you queer it up, call the protagonist and his lover Hameedullah and Osman, doesn't mean the story stops being Hamlet. My father, who jokes about being a high school flunky every five seconds like a point of pride, sitting by me when I was seventeen and told him I want to be a writer, saying to change the way someone looks at something — to make them see more than what was there before, that’s everything. I didn't see it then. I only realised the incongruity of such things when I started at Oxford. You didn't fail out of school, did you, Baba?" 

"No, he was the topper in our class year in and out. Did he finally tell you? Oh, Elrond, it’s lovely to see you again — though you need to be fattened up a bit, dead on your feet you look," Fingon climbs out of his car, smiling at Elrond and embracing him. “Or is that your Baba’s fault, hm? Trust you to come visit knee deep in election season, Elrond, though I will say, seeing you is so, so wonderful. And what's this? I feel like you’ve gotten even taller!”

“Fingon-uncle! Lovely to see you as well,” Elrond returns the embrace, kissing him on the cheeks. “Haven’t you gotten tired of Baba yet?" 

"Watch it," Maedhros warns, though even he can't help the grin spreading across his face at the sight. 

"Oh, no, no, he keeps me young," Fingon shoves his spectacles further up his nose, winking at the Comrade. "See, only one grey streak, and that, they say - is distinguished. But come, we'll go have dinner, us-two, before heading off to the square, and have a good catch up. And I'll tell you of all the nonsense your uncles have gotten up to as well." 

"Yes, I heard Caranthir properly joined up with the Naxals now," Elrond frowns, before saying more lightly. "And to answer your question, no, he's not told me. He was insisting just five minutes ago, like he's always done, that he failed out with aplomb." 

"Ah, whoops! I thought he'd said, he'd forbidden me to… well, he topped his classes every year we were in the same class, and we were in the same class since we were five," Fingon says, linking arms with Elrond as they walk over to his car. "Now, to Paragon restaurant? Since the cat's out of the bag, I'll tell you all about your father's antics in school." 

Maedhros clicks his teeth, irritated. 

"And what of it, hm? What use is it to dwell on such things now? Has world hunger been solved, knowing what marks I got in school?" he barks after the two, giving them both the finger as they get into the car. He is still for a very, very long time, staring at a muddy spot in the yard, before turning away and heading inside to his brother. 

Maglor beckons him into his room, holds the door to, and cuts to the chase. 

“Ikka, the twins are already halfway to joining the youth wing of the Party. They answer the damn phone with laal salaam, comrade. I have told you, when I started raising them, that I refuse to let you drag them into all of that,” he starts in a whisper, meeting his brother’s irritated glare with one of his own. “I care about the Party as much as you do, don’t get me wrong. But they’re six, Maedhros. They’re bright too, both of them, and it would be such a waste if they didn’t put their brains to some use.”

“Hm, all right, I take your point,” Maedhros nods dismissively. “I won’t take them along, fine. Sorry, I’d forgotten when I suggested it this morning. Is that what you wanted to see me about? For god's sake, man, I should be in the square now, not… listen, I'm sorry. I won't do that again, I promise. Leave it now.”

“No, I don't just mean that. I meant to talk about — about their schooling,” Maglor takes in a deep, tentative breath. “There’s a better one in the next town over — St Joseph’s. You know, the one Finarfin’s boy attended, the Catholic-run one.”

“Yes, yes, I know it. Fingon and I used to throw stones at their windows, if you mean the one in Changanacheri. Think I thrashed their headmaster at some point, the strike-breaking bastard.”

“You’re proving my point again, ikka. I think it would be good to move the boys over there,” Maglor’s voice wavers nervously. “It’s a much better institution, and it’s state subsidised as well, but even so the fees are quite steep. But I think it would be good for them — at the end of the day, you, well, our whole family, are far too involved in the runnings of the district for the boys to get a fair education. There’s no chance for them to be treated fairly in a town where their notoriously hotheaded grandfather heads up the Party and calls the shots. If Celebrimbor wins the election, that's double the case. St. Joseph’s would be a godsend.”

“Hm,” Maedhros frowns slightly. “I see what you mean. What are the fees?” 

“Two thousand a year.”

“We can’t afford that,” Maedhros’ eyebrows almost disappear into his hairline. “That’s a ridiculous sum, Maglor, it’s almost thrice the median wage. And do you think I can show my face at the Party after taking out a loan to send these two to a private school?”

“I know we can’t afford it, and I did not mean we take out a loan. That’s why I’m suggesting something else.“

“Are you suggesting we ask Elrond, Maglor?” Maedhros’ eyes widen dangerously. “You better not be suggesting that.”

“No! No, I’m not suggesting that,” Maglor inhales deeply, and then spits out the words quickly. “It wouldn’t feel right. I know. Now, listen. Don't overreact, ikka, listen. No, I’m suggesting we sell some of the jewelry. The box we’d been keeping for Arwen. Not Ammë’s jewelry, no, just the pieces we bought. It would pay for a few years at least, till they finish primary school, and then they’ll be set to take the state exam and get into a good secondar—“

“Finish that sentence and I’ll run you up the damned flagpole,” Maedhros’ voice is perfectly even, all the more chilling for its calmness. “No. There is no question of selling that. Suggest it again, and I don’t give a damn how closely we are related, I’ll make you regret the day you were born. No.”

“But what use is there now, for us to hoard all that gold?” Maglor shakes his head, gets in a short, somewhat pointy, “They are your grandsons too, Comrade.” 

“We can come up with something else. I understand your point on their schooling, but I will not let you sell that.”

"Fine! Fine, then! Let them stay here and talk of beating up the opposition at six years old! Perhaps this is, of course, what you want. You will turn them into your little revolutionaries an—“

“SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH OR I WILL KNOCK YOUR TEETH OUT,” Maedhros roars, eyes vacantly vicious, moving at timeblurring speed and clutching Maglor’s collar with his good hand, pinning him against the cupboard. Zero to ten in an instant, record-breaking even for him. “How fucking dare you, you shit-eating cunt. I will nail you to the fucking wall, you understand me?”

“Ikka!” Maglor shoves his brother backwards, barely stopping himself from backhanding him harder than he does. Maedhros reels, stumbling backwards. “I’ve told you once if I’ve told you a thousand times, this will NOT work on me — you can’t scare me with the comrade act! Get yourself together!" 

“Don’t you fucking understand me?” Maedhros snarls, wide-eyed and squaring up again. “Hm? I’ll thrash you black and blue at the next word out of your damned mouth.”

His brother watches him for a long moment, notes the tremble of his jaw, the subtle shaking of his hand. 

“Ikka?” Maglor lowers his voice, closes the door. “Ikka, what is it? Even you don’t flare up this quickly. What has upset you so? Is it seeing Elrond?” 

“Leave it!” Maedhros wrenches out the words, turning swiftly away, furious and embarrassed at once as his voice cracks. “Leave me for a moment. Get out.”

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Maglor doesn’t balk, instead he approaches his brother slowly. “Ikka, you can’t go on like this. Keeping your mouth shut about whatever hurts you, only to fly off the handle at something small. Please. Tell me.” 

Maedhros is silent, his throat working as he tries to compose himself. He shakes his head. 

“I’m sorry, Maglor,” he says at last, defeated. “I’m sorry. I don’t give a damn. Sell what you want to sell. Do what you want. Just don’t tell me about it. I don’t want — no, I can’t know. Sell the whole fucking house if you want, sell everything. Don't tell me about it. I gave up my right to know."

“No,” Maglor places a hand on his brother’s shoulder, lays a gentle pressure. “No, absolutely not. Please, tell me what it is. I won’t judge you for it, whatever it is.”

"You won't judge me," Maedhros laughs through his nose, and then turns back to his brother, voice steady again and newly cold. “Won’t you?”

“Of course I won’t.” 

“Then why do I not live here, Maglor? Tell me. Hm? Why do I not live in this house, our father’s house, the deed of which is in my name, eh? Why do I stay with Fingon, when I used to sleep here most nights, at least four a week? Why was last night the first time I woke up in this house for the last five years, and even that — even that on the bloody porch. Why do my grandsons call me Uncle Maedhros, and call you achachan?" 

Maglor blanches. 

“I thought so,” says his brother roughly. “Move aside. Move. Don't get in my bloody way. Elrond will be back only later, you can lock up. Khudha hafiz.”

“Khudha hafiz,” he whispers in return. 

Maglor hears the crossed-swords rattle on the porch as Maedhros slams the front door, hears the bike choke as his brother kicks at it viciously a few times, and then he is standing in the dark, feeling terrible and terribly alone until he hears someone sniffling at his feet. 

"Elrohir, what is it? Come here," Maglor bends down to the boy, wincing slightly, having twisted a disc pushing his brother off him. He carries the boy, wipes his tears, doesn’t say a word about the thumb in his mouth. “Were you scared?”

“I woke scared. There’s shouting,” Elrohir whispers through his thumb. “Was that Uncle Maedhros? Was he angry at you? It’s not him right? He’s so kind!”

Maglors shakes his head, clears his throat, though his voice breaks a little regardless. A slight shadow of shame runs through him. “Just a small argument, it was both of us only. Like you and Elladan arguing this afternoon, see? Silly things. Don't worry. All over now. But can achachan sleep up there with you today?” 

Elrohir nods gratefully, jumps out of his arms and pads up the stairs. He hops into bed, pushes his brother gently over so Maglor can get in between them. “Is it cold downstairs? Is that why?” 

“No, no, not cold,” Maglor presses a silent kiss to his forehead, turns over and delivers another to the sleeping Elladan too. He has been the father of twins twice over, he knows their little balance-sheets by-heart. “I just missed you both. I was feeling…”

“Like when Elladan is playing with someone else?” whispers the boy. “Alone?” 

His grandfather presses another kiss to his forehead, takes in a shuddering breath. “Yes. Very alone. But not now, right?” 

“No, now there’s us three. Good night, achachan.”

Maglor sings the boy back to sleep, quietly grateful that alone to Elrohir meant only Elladan playing with someone else. That it did not mean police stations and statues and fire and flagellation. He knows why it is so, even in a world where their teachers languished in jail for years. Still. Still, it is cold, even with the boys pressing against either side, and he can taste cold-steel guilt, all the way down his throat. Because Elrohir had called him achachan, and Elladan does too, and there was the three of them, so he isn't alone. And Maedhros too, isn't alone, he knows, not with Elrond latching onto his every word even now, not with Fingon by his side. Still, the look in his eyes. His brother, the walking wound. Still, his lonely eyes, even lashing out at him like he had. Eyes that knew that nobody would call Maedhros achachan again, not even those who have only ever known his kindness. 

The wound cannot exist without the knife, nor the knife without something to maim. 

“C— c— comrades,” starts Celebrimbor. He is just as quiet as he had been when he was a child, had just as severe of a stutter. Elrond positions himself next to Fingon, and sets up his camera, marvelling at the fact that none of the crowd seem to be heckling him, a treatment they even gave Maedhros on the regular, and Celebrimbor didn't seem the type to jump off Jeep roofs and start battering hecklers. Still, there's a quiet, commanding presence about him, something that silences the crowd even before he says a word. Elrond remembers that EMS Namboodiripad, the state's first Communist Chief Minister, and one of the greatest orators of Kerala, had a stutter far more severe than Celebrimbor’s.  

“I thank you f— I thank you f—for coming here.”

“This election will drum out In— Indi— Indira Gandhi,” he continues. “This, this the-the nation knows. The-the world knows. That is not the question. The question is, what has the world known of the Indian Emergency? That she — that she is —“

“A DEMON!” shouts someone. “A BITCH!” calls out another voice, and Celebrimbor laughs. “A DICTATOR!” calls out yet another. 

“That she may be,” he nods. “But what does the world know of this d-d-d— of this d-d-d—”

Elrond flushes in sympathy, but his cousin doesn’t waver, and the silence does not break. There is neither heckling nor jeering, and if there had been, it would not have bothered Comrade Celebrimbor for a moment.

“Of this d—d—,” Celebrimbor breathes in, and then: “of this BRUTALITY? What has been published in the papers? What has the world been t-t-told of the Emergency? Numbers? That shops close early and that police stations are raided? That the arm of the state acts with impun— with imp — with impunity?” 

“What can the world? What can we people do with such f-f-facts? Nothing but sit and co-count. That is how they silence us, no? With fear. They censor the names of our dead, that we know. But what of their bodies? Where are the bodies? Still, comrades, we are here today because we kn— we know the stories. Stories don’t vanish, d—do they? They can make p—people d-d-disappear, they can erase names from faces, b— but their stories do not vanish. Every time we tell it, a story doesn’t just— doesn’t just live on but lives again, does it not?”

“Every story flows through us, through every worker, every student, every s—s—soul that dares to dream of a nation free from tyranny!”

"He's good," he whispers to Fingon, who nods, impressed. 

"He's brilliant, isn't he? Every time he starts I think he's going to blow it, but he never does. Your Baba's choice, by the way." 

“Elrond!” a quick pinch on his elbow and he turns around to see Celegorm behind him, who snatches the camera away from him. “Head over to the Party Office now, I’ll handle all this! You’ve got an urgent caller, international call. So I told them call back in ten-fifteen minutes. Start running.” 

“Shit, international?” Elrond pales. “Who is it? Cel? Mum? Has something happened?"

“No no, don’t worry, it’s that fellow,” Celegorm assures him, trying to get to grips with the camera. “Ikka’s new best friend. Gay-galad, he calls him. Your friend also, no?” 

“Gil-galad,” Elrond rolls his eyes, relaxing slightly. “What on earth does he have to say that’s so urgent?”

“You take it up with your Baba what he calls him,” Celegorm nudges him again, as was his terrible habit. “Go, Elrond!”

Celegorm watches his nephew slip through the crowd and start running to the Party office, muscle-memory kicking in, before turning to Fingon, hissing furiously. “Are you and my brother mad to have him here? What is it, brain poisoning? Have you both gone fucking insane? For this speech of all of them? Do you… fuck me, Fingon!"  

Maglor’s control, frayed to nothing, had snapped on the night Maedhros left the Library, the cliff house, his childhood home for good. Elros had been dead for only a few days, his one-year-old twins had been restless, and Maedhros approached one in his cradle, reaching in to pick him up and rock him back to sleep on his shoulder. But he'd been shoved aside by Maglor, whose eyes were wild and red with weeping. 

“You put a damned hand on them, Maedhros, and I’ll gut you myself." 

"What are you talking about? I'm just going to…" 

“No, I’m done,” Maglor spat, throwing his clothes into a suitcase, gathering up his musical notation sheets into a rough, messy pile. “I’m done, Maedhros. I cannot. I cannot take this a second time. I’m taking them and I’m out. I’ll stay with Curufin and his people, then we’ll find somewhere else to live.“

Maedhros had been struck dumb, his hand shaking and still outstretched towards Elladan’s sleeping form. “What is this? What’s gotten into you?” 

“I will not have you near these children,” Maglor had wrenched out, mindless and brutal in his grief. “Do you understand me? I will not have you, your poison, your kerosene, your fire — I will not have it near them. You put your accursed hand on either of these boys, Comrade, and I’ll cut it off myself. I am leaving.”

“Maglor, you don’t mean that. Sit down, we’ll talk about this later.” 

"When?" Maglor spat. "When? When one of them is dead? Or both? Should we wait till both are dead this time?" 

"Have you gone fucking insane, brother?" Maedhros reeled back as if struck, staggering from the cradles. "What is it? What?"

“To be true with you, ikka, perhaps he should have stayed with his mother. Perhaps I should have sent the boy back, even if he didn't like that country, hm? Perhaps even that would have been better. Elros was just as clever as his brother, just as talented. And look at them now, an Oxford professor and, what, a martyr? A consequence? A symptom? You will ruin them, brother. You will ruin these ones too. I know it.” 

“Do we think of our dead as symptoms of our environment?” Celebrimbor opens his hands. “Do we think of them as— as Party members or as -— n-n — do we think of their addresses? Do we think of th—their blood types and what temple or mosque they attended? Do we think of them with fear? Are they c—c—censored in our hearts? Can our hearts be censored?”

“What do you mean?” Fingon asks Celegorm. “It was your brother who asked him to go along.”

“Is my dear brother fucking deranged?” Celegorm hisses. “Has he seen the draft of this one’s speech? No, of course he hasn’t, he stopped home instead of the Office this morning, didn’t he? And he didn’t ask to see it beforehand! He’s losing his grip, Fingon, I tell you. You know I had to tell that Professor fellow to purposely call again in ten minutes? He had all night, and his call was not even urgent, but what the hell else was I to do to get him out of here?”

“Celegorm, why can you never tell a story straight?” Fingon turns to him, irritated in his own right. “Russo— sorry, Maedhros, told him to come photograph the speech, what does it’s contents have to do with Elr—“

“OUR HEARTS CA— CANNOT BE CENSORED,” thunders Celebrimbor to a roar of applause, before quieting again. “So let us speak his name. Comrade Elros.”

“Fuck,” hisses Fingon under his breath, as Celegorm rolls his eyes, glaring at him even as he took another few shots of Celebrimbor. “My god, Celegorm. My god.” 

“COMRADE ELROS TAR-MINYATUR!” roars the small crowd. Celebrimbor lowers his hands. 

“Elros, who was brought into custody for a speeding charge f—far—far f—from home. Who was taken from his comrade by the w—w— by the SHIT EATING JACKALS OF THIS REGIME, who was taken by the hands sworn to protect this nation.”

Maglor had been certain his brother would have hit him for his comments on the children, he’d broken kneecaps for far milder slights than this, he’d thrown people off buses for less, but Maedhros didn’t even raise his voice. 

“Maglor,” he’d said, a hand raised to his chest in supplication, his sentences breaking at each word. “Stay. You stay. Please. I won’t — I won’t interfere with them, I won’t even look at them, I swear...”

“No, Maedhros, I refuse to live on this salted earth, I cannot raise them in this accursed house. I cannot do this again. I cannot watch you feed another child to the earth, I cannot do this, because they are twins too and if one is taken then the other will be too no. I will leave with them.”

“Stay here. Maglor, please. I am begging you,”

"The house is in your name, it is yours. I won’t starve, I told you, I will stay with Curufin, his son has married and moved out so it wouldn’t be an issue with space. I can’t, ikka. I cannot have this happen again.”

“This is their house too, Maglor. Please. I will not say a word to them, I swear. I won't look at them.”

“And d— did our C—comrade — was he taken for something he did?” 

The crowd roars its dissent. 

Fingon is shaking. “Celegorm. Had he f — it would have killed Maedhros. God, it would have killed Elrond. Thank you, brother.”

“Shut the hell up and learn to read next time,” Celegorm grinds out, partly to hide the fact that he too was just as shaken. "Fuck." 

“No! They took him so they could get his father in!” 

The crowd is silent — the father they know well. Most have caught at least a threat from him, if not his hand. Some lucky fellows had even landed a blow on the man. His slogans and violence and larger-than-life existence had been known to them all. The story was never printed in the papers. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency started in 1975, but truly it had been in place for years before — the woman would not have called for a state of Emergency, had the nation not been in the palm of her hand, the police fed in her kennels. Still, stories never die. The crowd is silent. 

“They brought him in and m—ma—made him beg, did they not? Did our Constable Menon here not say the police made our Comrade’s father kneel? Four different stations they told him the Comrade was at, and d—d— HE KNELT AT EACH ONE, DID HE NOT?" 

Fingon’s head is bowed. 

“DID T—DID THEY N—NOT MAKE HIM SEARCH THE GUTTER THEN, FOR THE BONES OF HIS SON? DID THEY NOT WATCH HIM DO IT, KN— KNOWING THERE WAS NOTHING THERE?” 

The crowd is silent. Celegorm’s hands are shaking. 

“Where is he?” Celebrimbor asks, wearing an unashamed bleakness on his face now. “Oh, my f—friends. Where is my cousin now? Where is our Comrade Elros now?” 

“Then where is my boy, ikka? Where is my Elros?”

Maedhros’ shook his head. “He was my boy too, Maglor. I was his father too. You think I’m standing here calling his death a sacrifice to the cause? Maglor! Are you insane? He was my boy also. Four stations. Four stations, they made me walk to. Four times I begged them! I placed my head on the ground at the last one, because I had known they had killed him. I begged for anything they had! He was my boy too!” 

He was, Maglor knew it even then. He was Maedhros’ boy too. Maedhros had loved him. And he had loved Maedhros enough to want to be like him. And was that not why they stood there, face to face with nothing between them but air? A streak of rubber, a speeding charge, and what? 

"Then choose one now," he whispered, starting to cry again. "Twins, brother. Just like ours, see. Pick one. Birthmark under the collarbone, see, that one is Elladan. Other one is Elrohir. Pick one." 

"What?" 

"Pick one, and I'll do your job for you now itself, Comrade. I'll throw it in the sea right now. Will save us grief in what, ten years? Twenty? When you choose to eat him at last." 

He'd closed his eyes then, expecting the blow. It would come, he knew, because Maedhros had been a rabid tiger for the last few days. He’d broken the front door down when the latch had taken a moment to unlock. Fingon had told him he’d forbidden any mourners or well wishers from entering the house because Maedhros would have killed the first man he'd seen, and Maedhros had congratulated him coldly for it because he would have. 

But Maedhros didn't hit him. 

“Nobody will ever know where Comrade Elros is,” Celebrimbor continues. “They called him a Naxal. A terrorist. They are the reason our Comrade’s own uncle, my uncle Caranthir turned to the Naxals for good, sick at heart as he was. As we all were! For Elros was a son of this soil. He was born with a silver spoon in his m— m— in his m—, he was born with wealth and opportunity and he chose to stay here. Not Comrade Elros, not the Party Man, but our Elros! Elros of Kozhikode, who went to school with you, who ate alongside you, who wept at your sorrows before he looked at his own!”

“They took in our Elros for a speeding charge, for chasing some lackey from their party, and called him a N—N—N— they called him a terrorist! Elros, whose fathers scrimped and saved to send him not only to Kerala University but to Delhi for his Masters degree. He would have been an MP. And for what, hm?” 

Fingon’s eyes fill with tears as he listens to Celebrimbor go on. He describes painstakingly, the practice of uruttal — a method of torture deviced specifically by the Kerala Police under Indira Gandhi's regime. It involved rolling a heavy log, or iron pillar over the body of a stretched out suspect. Naxals, they had used them against. Terrorists. Groups that did terrible things, frightening things, groups that did not keep censuses of their members so it had always been very easy to turn anyone into one. Very few survived uruttal, and those that didn't. 

Well, who's to say they weren't Naxals or terrorists? 

"For what? To humiliate his father. And what d-d-d-d-did they do? WHERE IS COMRADE ELROS NOW?" 

The crowd is silent. 

“WHERE IS C— WHERE IS COMRADE ELROS NOW?” 

Still, a silence. 

But it is in this silence that the story is written. For Comrade Elros is nowhere at all. He is another unnamed story of the darkest days of the Emergency, and even the few papers in the West that had carried a few stories of the period had not mentioned what had happened in Kerala. It had been a Marxist state, after all, as generally peaceable as they were — a state that had wanted to split from the Indian union. It would only seem natural that they were a hotbed of Naxalite terrorists. 

Nobody claimed Elros’ body, because there had been no body to claim. They did not allow him even that luxury. That, you see, was the cruelty of it. Not that the debonair democrat without a single vicious bone in his body was called a Naxalite terrorist, not that he was fated to never leave the police station the moment he entered it, but that his death had simply been a game for Indira Gandhi’s dogs. Perhaps it was a pointless death. Perhaps it was not. But neither of those points matter in the face of the real victory for the dictatorship. 

For whom among us, has made the ineffable Comrade kneel in the dirt and plead, not once but four times? 

"Comrades, this is the enemy we face! A r—r–dictatorship that does not f-f-fear b—b—bullets, but fears the truth! A regime that does not fear revolutionaries, but fears fathers who refuse to forget! Students who s-s-s- who, who refuse t— t—o kneel! We do not fight for vengeance. We fight because we are human beings —and no human should be told what they are after they are dead! We will tell them what they are when we kick this regime out! We will not be drowned in the gutters where they left our Elros to die!" 

"Indira G—gandhi has not declared war on the people," Celebrimbor says quietly. He hops off the steps, walks among the crowd itself. They let him, in a way they would never have let his uncle nor his grandfather. "She has declared our d—d—defeat, my friends. She has told—to — told that we are corpses. She has told us we are defeated.  She has said the sun will n—never rise again. She says Comrade Elros will not outlive us all. But what does Indira Gandhi know of us?”

There is only silence. 

“WHAT DOES INDIRA GANDHI KNOW OF OUR HEARTS?” 

Nothing at all. Not a sound does the crowd make, as Celebrimbor disappears into it, and becomes one with the listeners. 

And this more than anything is why Stuttering Celebrimbor had always been Kozhikode’s finest orator since Fëanor. He had always been well versed in the art of pauses, a connoisseur of stories unable to be told and words impossible to say — he is no silver tongued wordsmith, but a curator of silences. That, more than anything, had been why his uncle had chosen him, for the first ever election after the breaking of the dictatorship. 

Maedhros had not hit him. He reached out his hand and grabbed Maglor’s own. And with a horrified twist in his stomach, Maglor realised his brother was weeping openly, as he hadn't even the moment he stumbled home empty handed, the knees of his trousers earth-stained, having gone to four different prisons to beg for their son’s remains. 

Maedhros had never been the kind of person given to tears, more the kind to whisk those of others into an omelette and call it an election day breakfast. All his tragedies, and of those there had been many, played themselves out behind the various heavy closed doors within him. Maglor could count on one hand the number of times his brother allowed him to witness his sorrow. Fingon could count the same on his other hand. So this had stunned Maglor, rooted him to the spot, destroyed him more than he had already been destroyed even then.

“Brother,” Maedhros had pleaded with him. “Raise them here, please. They have a right to this house, it’s a family home. Don’t make them guests in someone else's… Look. I’ll leave — I’ll leave right now.”

"This is your house, ikka. It was left to you," Maglor shook his head. "I'll go. It's not a problem." 

“Please, Maglor,” his brother was sobbing aloud, hand back on his heart. “It’s their house. I have somewhere to go. I’ll stay with Fingon. Not one night will I spend here. I swear to you. Please — this is your home. I accept fault. I was wrong, they — I know as well as you, Maglor. I was the one they wanted to watch beg. I dug in the dirt for… I did not — how could I — please. Please don’t leave.”

Maedhros had left that very night.

He’d walked to Fingon’s in the dark, and Fingon had come the next day to collect Maedhros’ things in his car and Maglor had been so afraid to meet his eye and see hate for him but Fingon had knelt at his feet and said “I know”, and they’d both wept together too. 

“Will you do one thing for him in turn?” Fingon had asked, gripping both his hands. “He asks only one thing of you.”

“Anything, anything.”

“Don’t tell Elrond,” and Maglor had closed his eyes, because he knew what the words would be. “Please, he begs you. Please, don’t tell Elrond, when you call to tell him about this. Please don’t tell him how it truly was. What happened to him, and why. He begs you, tells you it is too deep of a burden to pass to him, and that it would only kindle hate in his heart, not only for his father but for the world. He says he will kneel before you if he needs." 

"Allah. No. No, of course. No, he doesn't have to kneel - oh god, Fingon." 

“And I, Fingon, beg you the same, my brother,” Fingon continues, clasping Maglor’s hands tighter. “Please. Please, Maglor. It will kill him, to see the look in that boy’s eyes if he is ever cursed enough to see him again. Please. It will take my Maedhros from me. I am asking you as me. 

Maglor had nodded. And he kept his word. 

Because he understood his brother more than anyone in the world, and his brother understood him more than anyone else, and neither of them bore any hatred for the other. And that, for Maglor, had made it all worse. For the cliff house could easily sleep twenty. Fëanor had seven sons. Everything he built, from sword to shield to the nalukettu house on the cliff, had been a family home in one way or the other. His father’s creations were never made for cruelty. The cliff-house was never made to be exiled from. 

"Have you been crying?" Maedhros asks quietly, the sand not even stirring under his feet as he walks over to Fingon. He'd been riding home when he spotted his lover's car parked near the beach, and the man himself sitting on the sand, the lone figure under the cliff. "Fingon? What happened?" 

Fingon wipes his face and smiles up at Maedhros, noting how tired the latter seems, far from the figure he had cut just that morning when he'd dropped his bike off. He'd wanted to tell Maedhros to be careful, to shout at him about going out in the streets and thrashing people even now, wanted to tell him to tell Elrond the truth about Elros before he found out. 

"Nothing," he sniffs, drying his eyes and putting his spectacles back on. "Nothing yet. I was just… being maudlin. Thinking of old times. Just old sorrows. Come, sit down. You look so tired.”

“I am,” He sinks heavily down, but places a gentle hand on Fingon’s face, catches a tear. “I am so exhausted. As though I’m only ever living for the next few days. The elections, Elrond. Then nothing. I’m sorry, Fingon. Calamity seems to follow me around. I’m sorry there have been old sorrows plaguing you. I just… had you not…” 

“Hush. We would be Maedhros-and-Fingon even if the world ends,” Fingon says, leaning into the touch, his toes half-buried in the sand. “Because we have been Maedhros-and-Fingon since we were six and gave the school daily frights when we would run away from under their eye to go fishing in potholes. Maedhros-and-Fingon, the teachers would say — stretch out your hands. And you would always put out two hands and take my punishment too, because I used to cry at the sight of the ruler. Do you remember? Always, you and I, back-benchers, class-skippers, pothole-fishers. Maedhros loves Fingon, and Fingon loves Maedhros, and it will be so always. Terror charge or tsunami. It will be so always.”

“Maedhros loves Fingon, yes,” Maedhros looks out at the sea, watches the red sun bobbing up slowly over it like a distant lure, calling to elsewhere. “It will be so always. But why does Fingon love Maedhros? Does Fingon wish to spend his future as the keeper to a rabid dog leashed to a rotting post? He is better than such a life. How can Fingon love Maedhros? In his rage, his stasis, his destructiveness?”

“Because he does,” he feels Fingon shrug, as if it all truly is as simple as loving unconditionally. “Because when Maedhros was eight years old he knocked his own brother’s tooth out for calling his Fingon a sissy. When Maedhros was thirteen, he thrashed a twenty year old for the same. That has always been what sits within the rage and destructiveness of Maedhros. Love is just another way of looking at something. Squinting, glaring, scanning, loving. And what Fingon sees in Maedhros as he loves him, is too unexplainable and complex to be confined within the four rigid corners of a single photo. So don’t ask me silly questions like why.”

Maedhros nods, leans back onto Fingon’s knees. On the sand, Fingon realises, Maedhros is neither six-foot-four nor the remarkable Comrade. Here, away from it all, he looks at Fingon with the quiet, terminal exhaustion of a beached cetacean. The way a whale on the sand looks at the first person to come across it, the hopelessly grateful gaze of an irremediable calamity. 

Fingon never despairs at what Maedhros is. No, the only thought that ever brings despair to Fingon, is the thought of what he could have been. The artist. The scholar. The marks of violence, Maedhros’ scabbed knuckles marking each election season, the scars on his back, such things never grieve Fingon. He does not mourn the present. No, what he grieves are the dog-eared old textbooks secreted in Maedhros’ drawers, the scraps of poetry torn out of books, the left-handed sketches of a right-handed man. He loves the Maedhros who is, and mourns the Maedhros who might have been.

“Don’t leave me alone,” he whispers suddenly. “Changhey. My heart. Don’t leave me alone. No matter what happens with the election, the end of the Emergency, all of it. There will be violence, I just… don't. Don't leave me alone. You don’t leave me, understand? I'm — I'm so afraid. Because this place wants you dead. Because these people want to drink your blood.”

"They have always wanted to drink my blood. What is this fear? So suddenly?" Maedhros turns to him. “Why? Because you think I’m all you have? That’s not true, Finnu.”

Fingon smiles at the pet name, eyes reflexively darting around the beach because even alone on the seashore, men do not call each other pet-names in public, not even Party leaders. And then Maedhros does his own scan of their surroundings and furtively presses a swift peck to his cheek. Moving fast enough to be but a flicker to a casual observer. No one is watching them, so they are nothing in the darkness. 

What is it, Fingon wonders, the cause for this sudden playfulness? Seeing his son at last? A few more days of joy? Or is this the man I mourn? He's doing this to cheer me up, because I was in tears. This is him. The boy who would cycle me home from class even after his father pulled him out. The man who looked at his son’s sleeping face and all that sorrow written so sharply across it and decided to take him out on a day of motorbike campaigning so he didn’t sit and wallow as Maglor had mentioned he sometimes did. I know him. I know all of him. The Maedhros who is. The one who was. The one who would have been. 

He is certain that is it, hissing as the Comrade pokes him in the rib with a fingernail, only to use his sudden swivel to it against him, leaning over his chest and planting another swift-enough-to-not-have-happened kiss to the other cheekbone. And then, right on his lips, not just a brush, a true kiss, the first time they’d ever dared to do such a thing outdoors. Maedhros is never, ever this affectionate in public, not even on their own porch in the pitch dark. Fingon basks in it like a cat in sunlight, and it affirms his answer. 

“No,” he whisper-laughs. “But that’s not why.”

“Then why?”

“Because then, Russo, I’d stop being the happiest man in the world.”

"Happiest?" Maedhros asks in English, and the smile on his face is true, and Fingon's heart hurts at even the sight. 

The most beautiful thing in school, he had always been. And so terribly smart. Back-talking all the teachers, and they'd let him because he could run circles around them all. He’d topped the state exams when they were sixteen. A shoo-in for the college entrance exam, they’d said. And then his father had pulled him out of school because the famine had meant uprisings against the British were to begin again, and Fëanor had lived under the boot for so long that he had thought the struggle would never end. That Maedhros would need to pass down his torch to his children, and then his children after them, because Fëanor had no hope that the British would ever leave. They had been tossed out only fifteen years after the famine had ended. But by then, Fëanor had set himself on fire before king and country. 

And yet, when they were hanging about, just a few months after that, and Maedhros had looked so handsome even in his terrible grief at his foreclosed future that Fingon couldn’t help blurting out would I be in your heart in another life? In a life where I was a girl? Maedhros had laughed and said fuck no. Fingon had been blinking back tears only for the most beautiful boy he had ever known to give him a hasty peck on the lips, saying you’d be a shit girl. You'd be the worst girl, I'd fight with you all the time. You’re in my heart as Finnu - as my Finnu. And Fingon had doubted him because it was, well, it was then and it was worse around them and boys like them didn't call each other my Finnu and Maedhros had rolled his eyes and said when the fuck have I lied to you? You’re too pretty to lie to. I tell you, I’ll never ever. And he never had. 

“Truly, Finnu?” Maedhros asks again. “The happiest?”

“Truly,” Fingon says. "Between you and I, beloved, only the truth, always." 

He’s the one who pulls Maedhros in for the kiss this time, but Maedhros is the one who makes it linger. The stars start winking awake overhead. And it’s the most natural phenomenon in the world, Maedhros-and-Fingon in the dark, primordial nocturnal creatures crawling out of the day. The sunset carves the hollow through which they disappear each night and cease to exist outside of the queer spaces where their bodies touch. Each night happens and unhappens like a handshake; gentle and unchaste, an exchange of comfort, keeping-time with heartbeats, until the sun rises again on these two open secrets. They are comforted and wounded by the knowledge that when the sun rises — and it will, it always does —  Maedhros-and-Fingon will be swallowed by the dawn.

Maedhros falls asleep on Fingon’s lap and dreams in the way of a man who has nothing but dreams. He knows he has to tell Elrond about his brother. He does not dream of neither him nor Elros. He dreams of a game, and a ritual. 

Maedhros was a Communist, and so he was expected to be relatively atheistic, which he had happily taken to, having never had much time for religion. However, in such a religiously polarised country, he had also been expected to be an expert on most major religions, as any slipups could lead to rioting in the street. And so he had read the Quran, of course, but also the Bhagvat Gita, the Torah, the Bible, The Mahabharata, taken to them all in a nearly academic sense. He would read out the stories sometimes to the twins, who in their own way had the gods they hated and the ones they loved.

Their favourite had been from the Kaushitaki Upanishad, a set of Hindu scriptures: it was a deathbed ritual between a father, the dying party, and his child, because the twins had all the morbid fascinations of the average seven year old. They used to beg him to “play” it all the time. And he would. He would play-act the quiet ritual with them, because they loved it. They would take turns in being the child. It was like telling stories, after all. He had not thought, back then, about how stories never truly die. And perhaps this is why something goes wrong at the end of the dream. Perhaps this is why, in his mind, the tape gets stuck. 

The ritual is a father-and-son ceremony or the transmission, as the text calls it. 

A father, about to depart this world, calls his son. Having strewn the house with new grass, having built up the fire, having placed near it a vessel of water with a jug, himself covered with a fresh garment the father delivers to his son:

Father: My speech in you I would place.

Child: I take your speech in me.

Father: My breath in you I would place.

Child: I take your breath in me.

Father: My eye in you I would place.

Child: I take your eye in me.

Father: My ear in you I would place.

Child: I take your ear in me.

Father: My heart in you I would place.

Child: I take your heart in me.

Father: My deeds in you I would place.

Child: I take your deeds in me.

Father: My pleasure and pain in you I would place.

Child: I take your pleasure and pain in me.

Father: My bliss, delight, joy in you I would place.

Child: I take your bliss, delight and joy in me.

Father: My movement in you I would place.

Child: I take your movement in me.

Father: My hopes in you I would place.

Child: I take your hopes in me.

Father: My grief in you I would place.

Child: I take your grief in me.

Child: I take your grief in me. 

Child: I take your grief in me. 

Child: I take your grief in me.

Child: I take your grief in me.

Child: I take your grief in me. 

Child: I take your grief in me. 

Child: I take your grief in me.

Child: I take your grief in me.

Child: I take your grief in me. 

Child: I take your grief in me. 

Child: I take your grief in me.

Chapter Text

Self-flagellation is, of course, an occupational hazard of being Maedhros Feanorian. There are a hundred reasons why he is a fervent practitioner of the kuthu ratheeb, the slashing-ritual, ranging from queerness to claustrophobia to morbid curiosity to slight boredom. And there are a hundred ways one can view Maedhros Feanorian performing the ratheeb, depending on one’s own positionality. A tourist to the region would consider it, yes, yes, exotic, erotic, yes, yes, all of the above. A son would think it is his father’s way of speaking to him, a brother would wince at the pain someone he loves inflicts upon himself. To a page, it is a series of steps: bathe in the Arabian Sea, face Mecca with your swords drawn, head bent. The music begins, and the men sway, chant: ya sheikh, hai Allah, ya sheikh, hai Allah. And then they lash themselves with the swords. Oh yes, no getting around that part. 

In actuality, the ratheeb is just a story being played out before your eyes. A set of stories, four-to-six in each performance. One is the story of Maedhros Fëanorian, told in grief and fire and blood. 

Think of this. 

Imagine your father is dead, and your mother. And two of your brothers, the littlest two, who should have lived the longest: the most promising little sparks. Imagine your son is dead, and they made you scrabble in the dirt like a pig, in the hopes of finding him. Your son is dead. Your footsteps would be very heavy by now: each one would sink into the earth, I reckon. Many parts of you are dead now, and each ya sheikh, hai allah of the ratheeb is a little step, a pacemaker-trip. Your son is dead. Your grandchild is dead, and your son has returned with an unbearable grief knitted across his brow. You try to smooth it away, you take him out each day and you cannot look him in the eye. Your hair is wild and eyes wilder, you have few words and almost no gentleness left in you. You are bleeding and parched and dying so beautifully. Your son is dead. Ya sheikh, hai allah. Your son is dead. 

Sound and ritual anchors you to the ground, pain reminds you that you are alive. But your son is dead. They buried him and you do not know where he is. Your son is dead. Your blood sings his memory. Ya sheikh, hai Allah. You walk past his image every day, your desk faces a statue of him in the square. Your son is dead. Everyone knows. You put one foot infront of the other and walk. You spend each day facing the world that killed all these parts of you and you are expected to keep your composure. Your son is dead. Your son is dead. Your son is dead. 

Look at you. Look what I have done to you. 

When the phone rings at four in the morning, it is Fingon who rolls out of bed, muttering about foreign telephone lines and lack of consideration of bed-times, convinced that it was someone from England calling because these days, it usually is someone from England calling. Just the other day, Elrond's pompous professorial friend had cornered Maedhros on the line and goaded him into a forty minute argument on whether or not the gay community, globally speaking, should elect a president. Gil-galad had, of course, been of the opinion that such an endeavour would be nice to think of in an idealised future though both impossible and somewhat pointless at the moment. Maedhros had dragged the argument out purely to cost Gil-galad a quarter of his salary in collect charges, before declaring that if there had been a global gay election, he would sweep it through violence, blackmail and pure charisma — had he been gay, that is. 

The other, less controversial caller had been Elwing, though it made Fingon truly appreciate the passage of time and the rose-coloured goggles of perspective, the way in which Elrond's mother is nowadays considered the least controversial caller to the house. She had called because the phone had been turned off at Maglor's place and she needed to ask Elrond a few questions about booking Celebrian's flight because Celebrian had forgotten, which had in turn prompted Maedhros to give Elwing a lengthy lecture about the electrification of rural Kerala, namely that his Party had been advocates for a slow geographical rollout as opposed to letting only wealthy landowners get electrified first, and the fact that conserving electricity meant that people had to unplug their already-expensive phone lines. 

"You know how I iron my clothes?" Fingon winced as he heard his beloved's passionate, if rhetorical, questioning earlier that evening as he entered the house. “No? You don’t know? How you are a woman and not knowing ironing? What you do at home all day then? Cooking only?” 

A pause as Maedhros nodded, impressed by the stream of perfectly polite and almost poetic sequence of obscenities through which Elwing, who had been gainfully employed by the Foreign Office for a good thirty years before her retirement, conveyed her opinion that Maedhros was nothing but “an old misogynist codger whose homosexuality is a monumental blessing for the fairer sex”. 

”Very good words. Now. Let me tell you how I iron,” he steamrolled on, used to debates turning into open warfare. “You think I use electricity? From this bloody government? Bankrupt I would be. No. You listen to me. First, we get out coconut shells. Inside part only, none of the outside husk. Then, dry them out outside, usually in the verandah but sometimes I make Celegorm spread them out on his roof so he has something to do and won’t cause trouble. Like dogs, brothers are. Must give them some bone at all times.”

Another pause, as Elwing presumably and justifiably asked what any of this has to do with either electricity or ironing clothes. 

“Your people are always having this much hurry? For what? Late to go somewhere else and do more beatings and killings of innocent peoples?” Maedhros had exclaimed, prompting Fingon to roll his eyes as he toed off his shoes and hung up his overshirt. “It’s connected. Just wait. So —- real secret is that coconuts are the best fuel source available. And almost free, you see. You want steam? No need for coal. Get coconut shells. Every sisterfucker has a coconut tree in their house, or near enough. So then you take the shell, break it up after drying…” 

 He had to muffle another cackle as Maedhros begins listing out his entire wardrobe, “none has even one single crease. You come here and check if you don’t believe. Not one crease anything has. Unlike your son’s chaddi trousers. You know why? Because I iron my clothes Communist style”. 

It was, Fingon thought, almost as if the comrade enjoyed these overseas phone calls. 

Today, however, it hadn’t been either of them. As Fingon crawls back into bed, yawning, Maedhros stirs awake mid-snore, turns over to bury his head in the other man’s shoulder. 

“Turn the lamp off, Finnu, for fuck’s sake,” he drapes an arm around Fingon and pulls him closer. 

“All right, all right, and move over, too hot tonight for you to do all this,” Fingon clicked his teeth. “I needed the lamp to get across to the phone, I’ll put it out. And stop snoring, you’re worse than the ringing phone.” 

“Hot? But it’s freezing,” Maedhros lies through his teeth, nuzzling closer despite the protests about heat and stuffy rooms. “I’m an old man. My bones need warming.” 

“We’re the same age.” 

“Physically only. Mentally, I’m six times as old,” Maedhros murmurs complete nonsense as he falls back asleep, before tapping Fingon awake once more. “Oh. Who was it on the phone? London again? That professor needs another lesson about ass-washing practices?”   

“Oxford, not London, and can you stop talking about ass washing every time you speak to them, Russo, great representative for India you are. Indian mental hospitals being full I mean, for a lunatic like you to be wandering about unleashed.”

Maedhros, even half-asleep, is both an unstoppable force and immovable object: “Hello? Is it my fault they don’t wash their ass in their country? So strange their habits are. It’s their cold weather, Finnu, I tell you this. It makes them behave in odd ways. Like elephants, during rutting season, something biological it is. Even my own Elrond has turned into a Siberian shitlord, wearing shorts and sleeping on the porch on the coldest nights. Or maybe all the potatoes. Constipation is the world’s quietest serial killer. Asshole is just as important organ as heart, for your body to function.”

“Jesus, you deplorable creature, even mass electrification would not give your monologues an off switch, would it? Anyway no, it wasn’t them calling. It’s not a big issue,” Fingon stretches his legs out, kicking the others’ out of the way somewhat violently. “You’re too tall, move aside. Just Celegorm on his monthly vandalism spree, call from the police station. He said to send one of the boys from the Party in the morning, just needs a signature, no charges pressed. Went and painted some obscenity on the Congress office wall, something involving Finrod and a dog. Usual stuff, Russo.”  

“Idiot, I keep telling him to do his nonsense at an hour decent people are awake, not in the middle of the night,” a yawn, as he settles back on Fingon’s shoulder. “Fine. Tell me again in the morning when I wake up properly, Finnu. I’ll send someone when I’m at the office before rounds… if I remember. He enjoyed their breakfast last time, maybe he should have lunch there this time.”

Fingon laughs. “Remember when he got arrested in Guruvayur for… I don’t even remember. Trying to talk with the elephants? Said they would have an innate connection with him the moment they saw him.”

“Bastard should have gotten jail time for that one, nearly caused a communal riot,” Maedhros stifles a snort. “Ikka, I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed for Muslims to go in, as if going in was the problem, not messing with their bloody elephants. It’s fine, that lesson I have now drilled into him.” 

“Well, I don’t think it’s that this time thankfully. Just his usual antics, so go to sleep and we’ll send someone over tomorrow. He sounded cheerful enough about jail breakfast anyway.”

“Yes, he would, the idiot. All right, I’ll send someone after I go in. Remind me which station?”

“Kasaba Station, near the old hospital, it is relatively close to the Congress office so I assume it had been them doing the rounds. Thankfully it isn’t one further away — Constable Menon himself was the one who took him in. Our closest as well, so it’s not much of an in… Russo? What is it?”

For Maedhros had just shot up in bed, face set, looking at Fingon in horror before leaping up, groping about for his clothes in the dark. 

“Fingon, light the bloody lamp again,” he snaps. “I can’t find anything — turn it on!” 

“All right, all right, here. What is it, Russo? Where are you going?”

“Station,” he barks out, swiftly tying up his mundu and pulling on a shirt, fumbling with the buttons. “Fuck’s sake, can you sort this out? Fast.” 

Fingon rushes forward, concerned by the haste, especially considering Maedhros has never asked him for help with dressing himself aside from in the direst situations. He handles the buttons, watches his lover’s hand shiver, and then clench-unclench. “Maedhros, what is it? Should I come? What’s got you so het up? Celegorm is dragged in for vandalising something every month, my love, a couple of months ago you even told them to just keep him for the day.”

“Kasaba Station though — it’s Menon, that sonfucker,” Maedhros all but growls. “Bastard. I don’t trust him as far as I can spit.” 

Kasaba Station had been the final stop on Maedhros’ round of searching-for-Elros — had been the station in which he was made aware his son was dead, that he may-or-may-not be given his remains, and had to touch his forehead to a constable’s leather boots for such privileged information. He doesn’t remember, to this day, a single moment between leaving the station that night and coming back to himself a few days later, a doorknob in his hand, having broken down the front door to the cliff-house because it stuck for a moment, swollen by the rain. 

“Russo, calm down, Finrod knows Celegorm was taken in, Menon won’t try anything if someone else knows…” Fingon speeds after Maedhros, who was paying him no heed at all. “You don’t need to go, listen, I’ll go myself, you know why he wants you to come, the piece of shit. Why are you playing into his hands?” 

“What’s the alternative, hm? Fuck’s sake, this bike’s fucking ignition —- Finnu, what the hell is the alternative? I’ll go and dance to his fiddle for hours if he needs. It’s better than even chancing…” 

“Let me go instead,” Fingon rushes down the stairs to the yard, places a hand on the other’s shoulder but Maedhros glares at him. 

“Don’t you fucking step one foot in that station or any other,” he points a finger right in Fingon’s face, and even in the dark he can see it shaking. “I’ve told you before. Don’t give Menon, or any bloody cop, a reason to even touch you. I’ll lose it, Fingon. I’m telling you this again. I’ll lose it completely. These bastards lay a hand on you and they’ll have to fucking kill me after what I do to them. Stay here.” 

“And what?” Fingon barks back, not bothering to keep his voice down, their neighbours being both aware of and apathetic to the nature of their relationship. “Sit here and wait for you to come back after yet another humiliation? You think it’s that easy? Maedhros, let me go if you’re so worried, they won’t touch me, my father was the vicar, he…”

“And Elros’ mother once lived in Viceroy House,” Maedhros snaps. “You think any of that matters to any of these fuckers now? Ultimate power they have.”

“It’s just for another couple of months, they wouldn’t —“

“Haven’t you seen dying animals?” Maedhros’ eyes are wide, furious and terrified at once. “They’ll lash out at anything. Mothers, father, whatever. You were there, Fingon. When the British left, that whole year. We had to keep the children inside, half a year, remember? That whole decade even, living on a knife.” 

He gets the bike started at last. 

“I’ll be back this evening,” he says shortly. Fingon nods. He stares out at the blank night for a long time, before turning back inside. 

He knows that Maedhros is right, technically speaking. Menon is a dying dog: this election, if no other, would kick out the dictator and her party, but even if it did not, it would (at least in name) return political power back to the local seats and municipalities. And in Kozhikode, whether it would be Finrod or Celebrimbor that won the election, neither would tolerate the Menons of the world. Not because the two are particularly principled individuals — neither are. Not even because Menon had been the kind of cartoon villain sick fuck that enjoyed pulling wings off insects, no, more because of how Menon had flourished under a national Emergency that did not only provide a home for cartoon villain sick fucks who enjoyed pulling wings off insects but went as far as to pay their mortgages for them. 

Still. It is another blow, watching him jet off like that knowing exactly what would come after. Fingon is not hurt by such sights, but his exhaustion grows a little with each one, until it is difficult for him to carry his own body back inside. He loves Maedhros, and hates him for his incessant need to swim against the current, but because he loves him he knows what would happen were he to stop. His body would grow heavier and heavier, unable to stand upright once it stops being propelled by relentless initiative. It would feel like living with a mound of accumulating pebbles. The Comrade Paradox, he thinks tiredly, and tries to fall back asleep. 

“Comrade, I did not know —-“ Finrod rushes up to Maedhros the moment he gets to the station, uncharacteristically apologetic. “I didn’t know when I called it in, that it would be Menon! I would have waited here until someone —“

“Allah mian, dogfucker, calm down,” Maedhros raises a hand to shut him up, casually vulgar as always. “It’s fine. I’ll handle it. Thank you for waiting here, that cunt won’t do anything if he has an eye on him. Now get out of my sight before I thrash you for daring to speak to me this close to the election.”

“I could come in with you,” Finrod suggests, somewhat feebly, before remembering that Maedhros was the kind of person who would tattoo the British flag on his forehead and accept Hindi as the superior language of the subcontinent before being seen dead with the son of the Kerala Congress Branch President. “No, forget I said that. Forget it.”

“Good, I will also forget you exist, which is good for you, believe me. Now clear off!” 

Maedhros takes a deep, grounding breath before entering the station, Constable Menon gargles his usual mouthful of small cruelties, and Maedhros maintains a blank, placid expression and thinks cunt, cunt cunt, cunt, cunt. Obviously, they’re not going to charge Celegorm: Menon even goes so far as to explain that it wasn’t even the vandalism Finrod phoned up that had him dragged to the station, but rather the fact that Celegorm and his enormous mouth, having been cuffed by Menon, asked whether he was being arrested for loitering near the Krishna temple earlier that night.

“You understand, Comrade,” Menon waves a hand at his subordinate to go let Celegorm out. “I had to make my enquiries. Make sure he wasn’t doing any vandalism there.” 

“None of my family have ever vandalised, or even breathed near religious buildings,” Maedhros struggles to keep his voice calm. “Don’t try that with me, Menon. My father carved half the idols in the temple, he carved the steeple to the church. That horseshit won’t work here.” 

“Sure, sure, and the priest confirmed he was just peering around outside, but… I had to be sure, you see. Communal violence is on the rise, you know. And your people might start to… retaliate.” 

“Not in Kerala,” Maedhros snaps. “And especially not here.” 

“If you say so.” 

When the penitent exits the holding cells, he has the decency to, at the very least, look rather ashamed of himself. Maedhros takes another few barbs from Menon, glaring at his brother all the while, and when they leave the station he grabs Celegorm by the ear, wrenches him to the back of the station overlooking a small wood, ostensibly so that Finrod would be out of earshot — or would have been, had Maedhros not made the executive decision to forget the concept of ‘inside voices’. 

“If it’s about the office vandalism…” Celegorm starts, but Maedhros lets go of his ear and grabs him by the collar.

“I don’t give a fuck what office you vandalise or don’t vandalise, what I want to know is WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU DOING AT THE TEMPLE, BASTARD?” He shakes him, eyes familiarly blank and furious. “Are you trying to get killed? Do you know what they’re doing? Do you fucking know what is happening in this country? Are you fucking insane? You’re LUCKY! Lucky nobody saw you, and it was your shitty fucking mouth only that got you in trouble.” 

“I wasn’t trying to do anything, I wasn’t!” Celegorm raises his hands. “Ikka, it wasn’t — I wasn’t trying to do anything, I just wanted…”

“I don’t give a fuck what animal you wanted to go talk to, I told you with Guruvayur, you stay away from temples and churches!” Maedhros shakes him by the collar. “Are you trying to start a riot? You’re not a fucking child! Why the hell are you hanging about there?”

“I wasn’t trying to talk to a fucking animal!” Celegorm’s voice pitches upwards suddenly, breaks. “I just wanted to look — I just wanted to look at —“

“I don’t give a damn,” Maedhros snarls, points a finger right in his face. “Understand? I don’t give a fuck what religious itch you have up your arse that you want to scratch, you stay the fuck away from the temple, you stay the fuck away from the church. You know what? Stay away from the masjid too. Do you get me, Celegorm? I’ll bury you myself next time I catch you near anything like that.”

“I wanted to look at —“

Maedhros turns away, begins to walk off. “I told you. I don’t give a fuck what you want to do. Stay away from it.”

Celegorm wants to argue, wants to bite back at his brother as he often does, and he marches after him. His brother rounds the corner and Celegorm hears Constable Menon give him his usual treatment any time he passes the station. Usually some sort of veiled cruelty, a reference to fathers and sons, a quip about shared memories. Today’s selection was inexplicable and eccentric, even for Celegorm’s inexplicably eccentric mind. Menon leans on the doorway, cheerfully waving them down the long, winding path down from the station to the road. 

“Have a nice day, Comrade, enjoy the weather!” He calls out. “Such a hot day, weather forecast says. Oh, burning hot day it will be. Or maybe warm… warm… oh, no that’s a breeze I’m feeling. Bit chilly it will be…? Ah, cold day maybe. Freezing. Still, enjoy, Comrade! See you later!” 

Maedhros pays no heed to the remark, gives no sign that he’d even heard. But all the arguments and justifications Celegorm had for his indiscretion dry up in his mouth instantly, as he sees the minute trembling of his brother’s hand, the rage coiled tight.  

“I am going to bathe and ready myself for the ratheeb, make your own way home,” Maedhros snaps out, inclines his head politely to his brother and Finrod, though neither miss the muscle jumping in his jaw. “Khuda-hafiz, dogfuckers. Celegorm, go pick up Elrond’s photos from the developers and drop them at the Party office later today. Finrod, I catch you in my sight again before the votes are counted, I’ll drown you in the nearest pond.” 

“You have a nice day too, Comrade.” 

“I am sorry,” Finrod says again as Maedhros takes off in a puff of petrol, moving closer to the flushed Celegorm. “Chetaa, brother, listen — I hadn’t known it would be him, I hadn’t known the Comrade would come himself. I’d not have phoned in the graffiti otherwise, seriously. I’m sorry he gave you a hard time.” 

Celegorm looks over at him, frowning, before all the fight seems to leave his body. He shakes his head. “It’s fine. I didn’t realise either. I get done for this each month, you weren’t to know Menon wouldn’t pass up any opportunity to get ikka down here, and it was my own fault for bringing up the damn temple business.”

He squats, whistles through his fingers: “INDU! INDU-GANDHI! COME! Baba is out of jail!”  

Finrod’s eyes widen, looking right at the enormous bulldog lolloping towards them. “You named your dog Indira Gandhi?” he asks, with no small amount of envy. Celegorm, who had indeed named his latest canine companion Indira Gandhi, after the present dictator and Prime Minister, nods as if that is perfectly commonplace and that Indira Gandhi was second only to Rover in global dog-naming trends. 

“Have a problem? Is she your mummy?” 

“No, I’m annoyed I didn’t think to do it,” Finrod sighs. “And, well, even if I did, Daddy wouldn’t let me call her that. Would say it’s too Commie.” 

Celegorm grimaces: “Finrod, I need you to know that every time you, and only you because your sister was thankfully born with an ounce of dignity, you, with no trace of irony, shamelessly refer to your father, dear Finarfin, as ‘Daddy’ in public, an angel in your Christian heaven drops dead. One year of my life also, goes right to hell each time.” 

The obedient son, of course, cheerfully lets his former playmate and current political rival know that such knowledge only makes him want to call his father Daddy in public even more. Finrod, if we are to give him a brief introduction beyond ‘built like a tank’ and ‘aggressively affectionate’, was the bulldog-breeding eldest son and much-lauded heir of Daddy Finarfin, the head of the local Kerala Congress splinter faction who ruled both the Syrian Christian community and his band of fervently centrist rebels from the Indian National Congress with such an iron fist that even Comrade Maedhros grudgingly respected his existence. The two (Daddy and the Comrade, that is — not Celegorm and Finrod) clashed physically at least twice each election, a remarkable and routine event the local children looked forward to with much the same excitement they offered to bullfights and birthdays. 

Daddy Finarfin, it must be said, was not a particularly pious man, with his role in the Syrian Christian community resembling less the Pope and more the average mafia don. In fact, even the Daddy attached to his name was not a reference to his beloved children or to the ridiculous internal hierarchies of said Syrian Christian church, and was in actuality a nickname he gave himself after realising the brand-recognition his rival, the Comrade, had built up with his practice of saying bismillah before every beating.

“What’s with the hot-day thing? It’s meant to be a very average day, you know,” Finrod asks now, curiosity overtaking pre-election propriety. Celegorm straightens up, a vicious mask overlaid on his generally-calm face. 

“God knows,” his lip curls in disgust. “Some cruelty or the other. He’s been after ikka since the police were given unfettered power by the sonfucker in charge — and no, I don’t understand why. He’s not even a Congress man, is he?” 

“No, not even Kerala Congress, let alone Indira’s party,” Finrod frowns, shaking his head. “Just a cruel motherfucker I think. Those thrive too well these days, no?” 

Celegorm nods, not trusting himself to speak. His face twists briefly and he sets off into the dark, Indira Gandhi (canine edition) in tow. Finrod stares at Kasaba police station miserably, at the scraps of newspaper in the doorway to keep out the draft, in the well-tended compound. Who could anyone tell about the cruelties that took place inside those doors? The police? 

He grins bleakly, thinking about marching into Kasaba station and telling Constable Menon about Comrade Tar-Minyatur’s death. No. Elros was fated to become the kind of story that died with a generation, each death wave taking with it a wealth of secrets and tales. The brutality of the police under Indira’s rule: that he knew as well as any other who had grown up alongside him, be it Celegorm or even little Elros, a handful of years younger. But to make a man old enough to be your father kneel and press his face to your boot for his son. And then make him walk home empty-handed, have him exile himself from the house his father built. 

It could radicalise someone in an instant, he thinks. How hard must it be for that man, to walk by this building every day?

I couldn’t have done it, his own father had said, when he’d heard of what was done to Elros and his father. I couldn’t have put one foot infront of the other for the rest of my life. I tell you, Finrod, I don’t know what keeps that man alive. 

Small hopes, Finrod supposes. Little dreams. Was there any good to be had in such things, however? Is anything in this country truly worth saving? After Indira, then someone else. After someone else, someone worse. So on and so forth, until every little dream is decayed. Finrod takes another look at the station’s shuttered windows, its garden-green version of homely-invitation, the impressively white walls, all falling surely and squarely within the national parameters of acceptable violence. He spits at the threshold, and starts making his way home. 

_____________

When Elrond had asked Maedhros why he ordered a privacy screen to be set up at the mosque during the ratheeb, Maedhros had said “oh, because you people and your stupid cameras make me sick”. And then he had apologised for the you people jab, below the belt as it was, but reiterated the point about the gaze making him uncomfortable, so as to not tell the truth about the privacy screen: that it had not actually been Maedhros who ordered such a thing at all.

“I thought the whole point of the ratheeb was to be seen, though,” Elrond queried. “At least, the way I remember it. Is it because of the touristic aspect then? Because I can certainly understand that… not wanting to be looked at by Linda and her camera.”

“It is not that they look at me that makes me uncomfortable. It is how they look at me. It makes my skin crawl,” he'd replied, shrugging casually. “I don’t know the word for it, for how they looked at me, still look at me. All I know is that it makes my skin crawl. One time, the same week I insisted on the screen — there was a girl. Young girl, eighteen or nineteen, my granddaughter’s age, your Arwen’s age. A school group, I think, all were laughing and nudging each other, joking around. But all that I don’t mind — teenagers are teenagers. And then she looks through me as I pass her and tells her friend something. Nudging and giggling. Like I was not there at all. Screen went up next month. Watch me all you like. I just don't want to see it."  

Elrond nodded, then shook his head. He assumed it had been some sort of general bigotry, name-calling, slur-sampling, that sort of thing. “Children can be cruel,” he said. "The things I heard. Hell, the things Ereinion heard."

That was days ago, and now, half-submerged in the sea before yet another ratheeb, Maedhros wants to march back to the cliff-house, shake Elrond awake and correct himself. Wants to tell him that he will never understand, not Elrond, not Elros. Maybe Arwen would have. Probably. But not her father. The thought irritates him for some reason — that little pinprick of annoyance you feel when someone who loves you deeply has no fucking idea what you're talking about but nods anyway. He wrings his hair dry, wonders how insane he’d look if he did actually scale the cliff and shake Elrond awake and said let me tell you what actually happened.

“As if that is the biggest secret I am keeping from the boy,” Maedhros snorts to himself.

He tosses the towel over his shoulder and starts the climb up the cliff to the masjid, and stops in horror as he realises how fast his heart is beating. It must be everything else, he tells himself. The election. Elrond, Arwen, Indira fucking Gandhi, Maglor, the twins. Schooling. Futures. Whatever and whichever. Numberless causes for misery, all these monumental things. This is why he has been teetering on the edge of control all these days, he is certain. Conflict and chaos. There is no way. Comrade Maedhros has set fire to everything from munitions sheds to police cars, has spent decades balancing on moving vehicles with loudspeakers and graduated from prison early solely because he was more of a nuisance inside than he was outside.

There is no way he could truly be standing here panicking because some wealthy teenager was casually crude about him over a year ago. There are moments that never erase themselves from one’s consciousness — birth, death, love, wrath. Maedhros knows this, he understands upheavals, his life having been a constant and incessant series of them. Deaths and lives and burnings and burials. This had been none of the above, yet for some reason Maedhros’ mind had selected this little moment out of all the others to pin to the top of his heart, had chosen that one to be irrationally hurt by any time he thought about it.   

Two girls in school uniform they had been, and Maedhros nodded at them politely as he passed them on his way out of the mosque, bleeding slightly and feeling somewhat better for it. One of them blushed bright red, patted her friend on the shoulder.

That’s the one, that’s the lad I pointed out! Wouldn’t you like to sit on that one and ride him all the way to England, fuck him dry for queen and country? Stella, oh god, oh god, Stella, look at that, he’s wearing eyeliner. Why don’t we get lads like that in Surrey, hm? And look at what they’re wearing — leaves little to the imagination, right? I tell you, those crown jewels he’s hiding must really be something, the girl had said to her friend, and Maedhros’ lips had curled in disgust as he looked back at her over his shoulder. She’d waved at him, no malice in her gesture but no substance in it either, like waving to a baby in the window of a passing car. 

Her friend had laughed, said something he couldn’t quite catch from the accent, and then elbowed the first girl in the ribs and yanked her camera strap. Well, I know what you’re going to do with these when we get them developed, Laurie. You better make me a set of copies, I lent you my film roll for this!

They were children. Elrond’s daughter’s age. This child, laughing, saying something like that to his face because it had not mattered a jot whether he heard or not. She had paid her twenty rupees. She had bought him. A lad, she’d called him. He was old enough to be her grandfather. He’d felt sick to his stomach, sick enough that he’d turned back around, made a beeline to the tiny bathroom at the back of the mosque to retch himself empty, then stumbled across to the sink, hyperventilating, staring at his own face in the dull, cracked mirror. 

“Look at you,” he told himself. “You bleed so beautifully.” 

Maedhros had grimaced at himself and looked into the sink and then back up at himself, and then back into the sink again, unable to meet his own gaze. Wondered when it must have started, the slow process of losing one’s sense of proportion. There were children starving in this world, in this town. There was violence and cruelty and there were bombs and famine. And yet here he stood, shaking like a leaf over a passing incident he was certain anyone else would have forgotten in an instant. He looked back up at himself and saw that kohl had mixed in with the sweat around his eyes, had bloomed into dark, viscous clouds around his eyes. He touched his face in awe — how monstrous. 

Something had given way in him then. And for what? It had only been a couple of schoolchildren. Nothing so monumental as to unmoor him from his own body, make him feel cut adrift from himself. It was no loss, just a giggle-nudge. 

But was it not a loss too? Every loss revealed something new, providing a peephole where previously there had been plaster. This one unveiled the atrociously unchanging violence of a desiring eye, told Maedhros that he was a grandfather now and held all the power he ever cared to hold and still he was nothing more than the beautiful bronze boy who would make Fëanor’s sculpture deliveries to the memsahibs (and some sahibs) of the Raj, who would smile politely as they ran admiring eyes over his face and body until he grew to despise it. Until he made a life out of whipping his skin off of himself, far from their wandering gaze because they wouldn't go into the mosque. They wouldn't. And now here they were. 

Wouldn’t you like to sit on that one and ride him all the way to England, fuck him dry for queen and country? she had asked, all camera-lens and school uniform. 

And what could he have done? Could a man like him have said a single word to a girl like that, a girl his granddaughter’s age, in a damned mosque, without being dragged off in handcuffs once more? The British had gone from these shores decades ago and still the rot they left could banish him from himself with only a glance. All his convictions and ideology had done for him was shelter him from a world that wanted to diminish him. And when the shelter doors blew wide open — like it did with fuck him dry for queen and country — all the revolting horrors of it slammed back across his face and left him in a dingy bathroom, stooped over a sink. 

He watched helplessly as pain softened his eyes, outlined his features, turned him all the more devastatingly beautiful. A hateful stranger at whose bright window he stood asking to be let in, after a long journey groping through darkness. Silence on silvered glass, the drowning rush of terror felt by a man, who upon waking from a nightmare, comes face to face with the very ghost he had outrun in the dream.

Lad, she called him, eighteen and excitable. His granddaughter’s age. He stared blankly at the peeling sides of the mirror, the black mould curling out of its wooden sides and across the glass itself, eating away any illusions he may have had about the world having changed. 

“You’re wasting your time,” he said out loud, not-in-English. “You can’t fuck me dry. I was fucked dry decades before you were born. By your father, and his father before him and his father before him. There is nothing left for you.” 

It had not been the comment itself. 

The girls were young, he knew, and teenagers would be teenagers. The number of times he and Maglor had to scold Elrond and Elros for cracking jokes about girls in their class over the dining table, hell, the things he’d thought at that age about the boys in the Party, and when he was younger, boys in his class, not to mention bloody Fingon. And it wasn’t even that it was rude, or that it was directed at him — Maedhros had always been a man who prided himself on his thesaurus of vulgarities. Treefucker, ratshit-eater, I’ll shove my hand so far up Prime Minister Nehru’s arse I’ll find Edwina Mountbatten’s feet, goatfucker, shitsipper. He has called people worse things than what that girl could imagine, has himself been called far worse than anything anyone could imagine. 

No, he doesn’t really know what it is with this. That it was said about him whilst she was looking at him, their complete disinterest in whether or not he had heard them, the way it had taken him straight back to how it had been before. That she was Arwen’s age. The frozen-rabbit helplessness of it all. With a calmness far more dangerous than his splitsecond violence, Maedhros looked around the bathroom for something solid, found an old three-footed shoemaker’s anvil rusting away quietly in the corner. Took it up and deliberately smashed the mirror from the corners inward, and returned to standing over the sink, now with nothing much to look at. 

Maedhros had then taken the blood-spotted cloth off his back, wincing at the sting. He used it to gather up the mirror shards, tying them up in it and chucking the whole thing in the bin. He swiftly washed his face and hair in the sink, approached the small pot of kohl left on the mirror-shelf and re-lined his eyes, smiling slightly to himself at the idea that maybe he should have done all this before he smashed up the mirror and threw away his towel. He did a passable job regardless. 

He headed over to the imam, and apologised for the mirror, pressing money into his hands — not just the cost of the broken one but enough to purchase a better replacement. The mosque had been struggling, after all, and that had been why they started charging tourists to watch the ratheeb — something they would never have done had they not been desperate. 

The imam — an impressively diminutive and extremely elderly busybody named Bilbo Baggins, who had known Maedhros since he was knee-high — had protested, telling him it was only a cheap old mirror bought Allah-knows-when, that there was no need to pay for it let alone pay that much but Maedhros had rolled his eyes and told him to shut up and take the coins. No other words were exchanged between the two: Maedhros’ presence at the mosque was reserved solely for the ratheeb and funerals. He made no pretence of his general distaste for religion, but Ustad Bilbo never said anything of it, and welcomed him every time he came by for the ratheeb.

“I don’t know why you let him in the masjid itself, let alone perform the ratheeb there,” an acquaintance from nearby Mallapuzham had commented, a few years ago. “The man thrashes someone new every week, and has a mouth like a sewer. And even in Wayanad people know about his… preferences. He’s shaming the Party with this carrying on. I know you know his problem, Ustadji. That friend of his, the kathak teacher, that Christian, living together. Astagfirullah, what a world ours is becoming. I don’t know how this kind of people...” 

Ustad Bilbo had simply rolled his eyes. “What am I supposed to do about your curiosity on that matter? Go to their house and sit in the bedroom each night to check what they put where so I can give you detailed replay? Go ask the Comrade, I am sure he will tell you. Meanwhile I will call the caterers.”

“The… caterers?”

“Yes, yes. I assume you are OK with chicken biryani at your funeral? Or should I go for mutton instead? Hm, maybe egg puffs also. Although there may not be enough left of you to bury even…  Calm down, Reza. Anyway, it is one man. When he goes and starts sleeping with five, I will personally go to his house and make one leave so he can have four. Theologically acceptable in a sense… or at least will be if that incorrigible Fingon reverts from Christianity…”

“I did not expect such blasphemy from you, Ustad Bilbo.”

“And I did not expect such cruelty from you, not-Ustad Reza.”

“It isn’t cruelty. Maedhros can do what he wants, I am also his Party member, don’t assume I am wanting his downfall. I have nothing against it, I apologise for my earlier comment. It’s just… these days, Ustadji. You know I live in Bombay, my daughter goes to English-medium school. The Hindutva is catching on there with the Shiv Sena, fundamentalist propaganda is everywhere, and not just from the right wing. You know they are saying our people, Muslims, brought homosexuality to India?” Reza sighs. “Saying we are all like that. Deviants, corrupting the nation, see how we wear kohl, eyeliner, like women. The Sena are printing in the papers that all Muslim men are secretly homosexuals, my own daughter’s teacher dared to say it to my face. All saying bismillah in the front and giving it to each other in the back. I’m not asking you to bar him outright — just talk to him. The Comrade being a politician with that much local sway, and carrying on like that publicly… it’s just playing into their hands, Ustadji.”

“Then let him play. He can sleep with Richard Nixon and Rajiv Gandhi at the same time and broadcast it on All India Radio and I would not bar him from the masjid,” Ustad Bilbo snapped, irritated, hopping off his little stool.

“What can he do about the Thackerays or your choice to have your daughter taught by brainless Bombaywalas? You say the world is turning to wickedness? Yes. Yes, you are correct. Right before my eyes it is happening. They had that man twice your age kneel at four stations just last year, doled out the kind of cruelty I have never seen as long as I live and you, Reza, you are sitting here complaining to me about what he puts where in the bedroom! Yes, pure wickedness it is! What a world of wickedness it is that I live in!”  

All this to say: when Maedhros Feanorian pressed some money into Ustad Bilbo’s hand for the bathroom mirror he broke, the imam did not buy a replacement mirror. Instead, he ordered a privacy screen, so the performers could — in theory at least — pretend they were not being photographed for the enjoyment of schoolgirls from Surrey. That's all. Just a little thing, like that. 

“Down, Indu, down!” Celegorm nudges Indira Gandhi (the dog) through his doorway, a packet of photographs held over his head to protect him from the sudden downpour. He throws a biscuit on the floor, and then frowns as she turns around, asking for another. 

“Absolutely not!” He cries, tossing the photos on his desk and steering Indira (the dog) away from said desk. “No, off you fuck, my darling girl, it is a kennel I run, not a bed-and breakfast for greedy bitches like you.” 

Celegorm keeps up a running stream of scolding commentary as he shakes out Elrond’s set of photographs, checking to make sure the shots of Celebrimbor that he took were fine (they were, thankfully, because he did not need another reason to be on ikka’s bad side at the moment), and then noses through the rest, separating out the election material from Elrond’s nonsensical abstract photography — although Celegorm, frankly speaking, did respect his nephew somewhat for getting said nonsense developed on the Party’s dime. And then he comes across a set of photos that has the tip of his nose turn white in anger, and he slams a hand on the desk.

The dog, understandably, yelps. 

“Yes, yes, well might you wail,” Celegorm snaps, arranging out the offending photos. They were taken from inside the Krishna temple, he could recognise the art style in his sleep — the four-by-four mural that covered the inside of the temple, floor to ceiling. The dog whines uncomfortably again, sensing her master’s anger. 

“Hush, hush. The Emergency will end soon and your mummy, the real Indira, will be kicked out,” he tells her, shuffling the photos again, brushing the rest away. “Same like British were kicked out in 47. Then she’ll come back, or some other nationfucker will wear her skin, and all this will start again. And again we won’t see it coming. The bloodiest lines and circles in this world are invisible to the human eye, Indu-baby. I just wanted to see the mural. That’s all. My Ammë drew it, you know?”

Indira the dog, though she doesn’t, looks like she does. Even that is enough to make sudden tears rise to Celegorm’s eyes. He blinks them away, and shows the creature Elrond’s photographs: “see that? My mother drew it, and then painted it. She called it a fresco. I just wanted to see it again, just one time only. She was a photographer, much better than this idiot here, but her real talent, Indu-baby, was painting.”  

He looks at the array again, frowning, tries to piece the photographs together, but Elrond had no idea what it was he’d been photographing and so had just taken photos of whatever he thought was nice-looking. Nerdanel had been invited to paint the mural when Celegorm was only three or four — Maedhros and Maglor had been older, and the two of them and Fingon would never let him join in on their games, so Nerdanel had let him tag along. 

“See that, Indu? Nobody had a problem with Elrond going to see it,” Celegorm blinks back the tears, bites his lip. “Bloody grey-eyed sahib could walk straight in. His daddy is beating himself raw at the ratheeb as we speak chanting ya sheikh, hai Allah, other daddy sings maula mere maula, Allah hi rahim every Friday, and his mummy roasts turkeys at Christmas. In England to boot. And still they let him go inside. It’s not even his fault. He didn’t know. Could I just walk in? How is that fair, Indu-baby? My mother it was, that drew that mural. And they let Elrond go see it.” 

Nerdanel would tie him to her waist, because even at three years old Celegorm had a habit of taking off without a word any time he found something worth biting or putting inside his nose. The priest would regularly pop outside to check on the mural and he’d offer Celegorm whatever sweet was left over from the prasad, the offering to the idol. It had been a Krishna temple, the offerings generally of the butter-milk-and-honey nature, which the average three year old would consider a feast. When he’d inevitably undo the series of complicated knots Nerdanel secured him with, he’d go exploring in the temple — the priest right behind him, helping him clamber wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

“So sorry about him,” Nerdanel would descend the ladder each evening, brushing the sweat from her forehead with her hijab. The priest would be carrying Celegorm more often than not, having fed him his fill of the prasad and chased him around the grounds, let him paddle in the pond, scratch the temple elephant’s ears, even let him climb around near the idol. “Absolute menace he is, no matter what I do, he finds a way to mess around. Truly, panditji, if he’s disturbing the temple I can just leave him with my husband in the studio, the monkey you are holding behaves a bit better with his Baba.” 

“Don’t you dare leave him at home, Nerdanel-sahiba,” the priest would say, jogging Celegorm on his hip, making him squirm and giggle. “This is a Krishna temple. Lord Krishna was a very naughty baby, much like this one — running around everywhere, climbing and exploring. Just like your little monkey.”

“If you’re certain…” Nerdanel reached out for her third son, only for him to cling to the priest. She laughed, pretending to dust off her hands and leave him there, a situation he seemed to have no problem with. “See, you’ve spoilt him rotten now, panditji. He’s not going to want dinner now — just yesterday he asked for ghee and chapatti, no chicken, he said. Already you’ve turned him vegetarian!” 

“I’m not upset because I can’t see the mural, mind you,” Celegorm chokes out to the dog. “I’m not. I’m not upset about — about my mother even, Indu-baby. None of that. It’s just… what happened? What happened, Indu? It’s not you. Not just you. It’s not your Baba Nehru either. Not… I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what’s happening. My mother drew that mural, Indu. I saw her do it. And now even at night also, even at night also I can’t go and…” 

He buries his face in his hands. 

It isn’t some sort of precolonial nostalgia, to be fair to Celegorm. It isn’t even Keralan exceptionalism rearing its head again. The state could be as Communist-red as Lenin’s haemorrhoids and still, it remains one of the most casteist places in the country, with the literacy rates just giving it more words to disguise bigotry with. And Celegorm isn’t even of the opinion that Kerala’s relative communal harmony is due to the state’s unique positioning or educational rate or whatever mildly insufferable factoid the state government conjures up. 

There were several reasons for the lack of vicious religious tensions, the main one being that Hindus and Muslims and Christians found it somewhat easier to coexist in Kerala than in the rest of the country, because all three religions had arrived and spread in Kerala by way of water. The backwaters for the former, and the sea for the latter two. So the narratives of conquest, of “Muslims are invaders” theories which were beginning to set fires in the north of the country did not necessarily work in the same way in Kerala — at least, not in 1977. 

It’s a simple explanation, but the result is the same: when Celegorm was three years old, he ran riot in the Krishna temple as his mother painted a mural, and the priest doted upon him like he was his own son. Now, he’s hauled off to jail for going near the place. 

“It’s breaking my heart, Indu,” he sighs, reaching out to scratch the dog’s ears. “This country, my girl. It’s breaking my heart.” 

The priest had told him story after story, called him Baby Krishna — to the point Fëanor used to joke over dinner that the boy was being “slow-speed converted”. It was less that, and more that Celegorm was enough of a knee-high tornado that the priest was absolutely convinced he was being personally blessed by a budget Muslim version of little lord Krishna. Tendency to run towards and forcibly be the nearest animal? Mischievous enough to run away with devotees’ clothes as they bathed in the temple pond? Healthy appreciation for buttermilk to the point of cheerfully spurning his own mother? He’d had them all. Not a reincarnation, no, probably not — circumcised is as circumcised does – but the child was a good sign nevertheless. The mural grew and grew until it touched all four corners of the inner wall, then the priest asked her to continue on the next wall. Then the next and the next, and the whole procedure took two full years. 

She kept bringing Celegorm, because it kept him out of trouble, and because letting a child like him loose in Fëanor’s studio would probably have turned her husband into a terrorist a few years before the incident with the swords. There was a time — he’d been, what, four? Almost five, thereabouts, and he’d run straight into an enormous barrel of grain, upended the entire thing across the store room. Nerdanel had come rushing over, reflexively cried out “ya Allah!” and then clapped a hand over her mouth, unsure whether it would be that or her son’s mischief that would get them kicked out.

She had apologised profusely to the priest, offered to pay for the grain immediately — grain, if you remember, had been scarce in those years. 

“Calm down, sahiba,” he’d laughed, picking Celegorm up. “No harm done. It’s dry grain, we can get it back in the pot, can’t we, Baby Krishna?” 

“Yes we can!” And as if to demonstrate, the child had wormed out of his hands and hopped to the ground, scooping up a handful and throwing it back into the barrel. “I’ll do it faster than you can blink! But don’t blink!” 

“See, sahiba?” The elderly pandit pointed, grinning. “What an industrial little fellow — this will keep him busy for a few weeks at least. And I’ll help him out.”

“I am sorry though,” Nerdanel sighed. “I know I shouldn’t be bringing him here while I work, but it’s just difficult when there’s three of them… and another on the way. Maybe they’re right, you know… maybe we do have too many children for our own good.” 

“Ah, no, you must keep bringing him — who else will clean up the grain then? We’ve made such good friends as well, him and I. Now, don’t worry yourself about this. Little joys like this are important, just as important as grain. See how much fun he’s having here. It’s hard to have fun, living as we do. You hear me, Nerdanel-sahiba? Little joys are grain itself. God knows how long they’ll keep taking away our grain. God knows what will come after they go. Let the boy scrape up what he can.”

Celegorm drags his face from his hands, separates out the photographs of the mural and shoves them in his desk drawer because Elrond, he decides, won’t miss them. He blinks down at the dog, who had been nudging at him worriedly. 

“Oh, sorry Indu-baby, have I scared you? It’s OK, I’ll stop now. Now come, sit on my lap,” Celegorm doesn’t stop talking even as the enormous bulldog climbs on his lap, licking at his face and making him laugh, tilting back in his chair. “We can’t even blame ikka for his reaction this morning, you know. You know him, no? Always, always it is somethingfucker with him, but he was scared only. And oh, he was scared, Indu — my brother was shaking, and who can blame him? And at that station of all of them… where those bastards… OK, OK, don’t worry. I won’t talk about that, I’ll just get upset again. Don’t worry.” 

“See, my position is same as that Panditji’s, Indu: if mankind is destined to get bulldozed by the shitwheel of history, then let us all at least tell jokes to each other as we wait in the ruins, hm? Let us wear today the clothes we bought for tomorrow. Let us eat what we want, love who we love, shit where we want. They can never take the small joys from us. Small joys are grain. When they are scattered, the most powerful people in the world must kneel and scrabble on the floor to take them away from us, and even then they will not find every single kernel. Like me and panditji did that time. Some will blow into graves and cradles, others will roll outside and plant themselves. Do you understand me, doggie? It is grain. It is life itself.”

Celegorm dries his face from the licking, tips the dog off his lap and beckons for her to follow him to the kitchen. 

“So come here, I take back my scolding. Have this second biscuit. Have this third one also. Come sleep in the guest room today. Tomorrow I will make you mutton biryani.” 

Strangely, Maedhros’ heart is thudding as he walks into the masjid for the ratheeb: it is neither fear nor nervousness, he has done this since he was fourteen. It is not the memory of the girls, their comments, no — the privacy screen, even as he looks up at it, calms him slightly. So not that either. Yesterday’s rainfall collects under his feet. The alam begins, high, unyielding. The fakir starts chanting, and he starts to walk around the circular hall, blinded to his fellow flagellants. 

Ya sheikh, hai Allah. 

The chanting begins, the lashing. There is something inside him gnawing at the walls, beating at his heart from the inside. The mourning of Karbala, trapped in his heart, the death of Hussain. The death of his sons. The final call from Ali to his father, to Hussein: Father, accept my last salaam. 

He turns towards the comforting warmth of the story, seeking a door that will let grief run. Maedhros is a nonbeliever. It is not Hussein’s death he mourns. For him, the tragedy of Karbala is that open-throated final cry of his son. Ali, dying, reaching out for his father’s hand — Ali, grasping nothing at all. Ali, calling out for his father as he dies. 

Ya sheikh, hai Allah. 

The station, every time he passes it. Something in his walls, the rot under his floorboards, alive, alive, clawing at the earth. The tablas quicken around him, a frantic heartbeat. Alive, alive, alive. The fakir is wailing the words of the prayer, there is blood on Maedhros’ back. The station again. The winding path, the curated gardens. His shaking hand, his refusal to listen. He will not listen. He does not want to know. He cannot know. 

Ya sheikh, hai Allah. 

The station. Kasaba, where Celegorm had found himself this morning. Where he had ridden in the dark. Where he had shouted at his brother and then left, as Menon stood in the doorway, watching him. He does not want to know. He does not want to know. He does not want to know. Menon waving, talking about the weather. Hot day, warm day, cool day. 

Ya sheikh, hai Allah. 

Elrond and Elros in the yard of the cliff-house. One of them, hiding the other’s toy. Elros, of course it was Elros, and Elrond’s toy was the one hidden. Elros calling out — cold, cold, cold, oh, warm! Warm, Elrond! Hot! Hot, hot, hot! Elrond shrieking triumphantly, the little horse back in his hands. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know. Take it away. Take it away. 

Ya sheikh, hai Allah. 

The next thing he remembers, is Ustad Bilbo and him, alone in the backroom. Just like how it had been, after the girls. But the girls do not matter anymore. None of that matters. Bilbo is shaking his shoulder, red-faced. 

“What got into you? What happened? Were you trying to give them what they wanted?” 

Maedhros blinks. The scrapes on his back hurt more than usual — he must have gone harder than he normally does. “Sorry, Ustad. I —- lost control.” 

“I can see that! What state are you in, my friend? What has happened?”

The little imam looks almost afraid, and Maedhros is so tired of people looking at him with fear in their eyes. “I’m sorry. I was… I don’t believe in this. In any of this. I am…”

“Yes, yes, a Communist, a Marxist, don’t give me the lecture for the hundredth time,” Bilbo raised his hands, before hopping up on the bench, sitting beside him. “You have not believed since you were born. I told you a thousand times, that’s fine. You are welcome here any time. What is it, Maedhros? You look…” 

“What happens when a body is buried without the rites?” Maedhros asks, his eyes fixed in the distance. “Even if it is a non-believers body. What happens when Salat al-Janazah is not said over the grave? When al-Fatiha is not recited, when the duaa, the prayer, is not done. What happens?” 

Bilbo’s eyes widen. He looks closer at Maedhros, and a palpable fear — real this time — takes over him. Trapped grief is dangerous. Bilbo knows this. Put it in a bottle, a petrol soaked rag, all it will take is an invisible faultline, a hairline crack. Bilbo has seen this. Only fire can quench grief like that. It could kill him. Maedhros has never spoken of Elros after his death unless he had to. Even then, only in the third-person. Your friend. Your brother. Our Party cadre. Our Elros, never my. Bilbo had known Fëanor. He knew his grandson. His great-granddaughter, he knows of. And this vial of trapped grief, the only thing left. 

Maedhros turns to him, and his eyes go so far back. 

“My boy,” he whispers. “They buried my boy in their courtyard.”

The imam pales. “What?”

“Menon let it slip by accident today,” the man’s lips are almost blue, barely moving. “He… they must have done it after I left. I… on the night. Because I had checked it all. Hands and knees, I was on… I checked the ground and it had not been turned. They must have done it at dawn. After I left. I did not know. I thought they had taken him away, elsewhere, far, so he’d not be found… but this is smart. Who would I tell? Who could I ask to dig up Kasaba police station’s grounds? Menon?”

“Such senseless cruelty,” whispers Bilbo, partly to himself, and reflexively recites the prayer for the dead. “La ilaha il Allah.”

“No parent is prepared to wash their child’s corpse, are they? To shroud them, to turn their head to Mecca, to say Salat al-Janazah over them.” 

“No. No, Maedhros. It is unimaginable.” 

“But we would have done it,” Maedhros clenches his fist on his thigh. “Maglor and I. Somehow, somehow we would have done it. But they took that right away from us too.” 

He’s white as a sheet, trembling all over, his grey-green eyes wide and senseless. Trapped grief, Bilbo thinks again, with the same frisson of fear. 

“They buried him like a dog, Bilbo. At dawn, in the garden, like a dog. He was my boy. It was I who found those children. It was I who picked them up. In that terrible crowd, in my terror, in my fear, I found them and I picked them up. I should have the right… it was my right to shroud him. It was my prayer to say over him. I don’t give a damn if we’re non-believers. It was ours. Mine and Maglor’s.”

“It was,” Bilbo tells him feverishly, trying to keep him talking. “It was your right.”

Maedhros groans suddenly, eyes shut tight. “Maglor. How can I ever look my brother in the eye? Those little boys, how can I look at… how can I look at his sons? At his brother, at my Elrond, how can I meet his eye? His mother —- Allah, how can I ever meet his mother’s eye? Like a dog, like a dog. I am his father. Allah, they buried him like a dog.”

He is not calling out for Allah because he believes in a higher power, Bilbo knows. He is calling out because it is what his father cried out as he died, what his mother screamed when she heard what had happened to her twins. It is an embryonic comfort, a primal pleading. Maedhros stands, swaying slightly. Starts to make for the exit. He’s bleeding through his shirt, having not washed the wounds on his back. 

“Maedhros, stay here,” Bilbo hops up. “I’ll call…”

“I am his father,” Maedhros mutters, walking out of the door, as if Bilbo hadn’t spoken. “I am his father. I am his father, and I cannot go to him.”

Bilbo rushes to the phone, places an urgent call to Maglor, knowing he can’t keep Maedhros in the masjid physically. He sits near the phone for a very long time after. He knows, after all, what happens when Salat al-Jahanzah is not said, when the head is not turned to Mecca and the body not washed and shrouded. It means everyone has sinned, aside from the departed. It means that a little more evil has entered the world. He sits, and waits, and looks at his hands. This cannot go on, he thinks. He turns back to the phone, and dials four people, one after the other, has a quiet conversation with each: Celegorm, Finrod, Celebrimbor, and Finarfin. 

Maedhros finds himself on the shore under the cliff-house, and realises he can go no further. He kneels on the sand, blank-eyed and hopeless. “I am his father,” he tells himself, again and again. “I am his father. I am his father.” 

He is. It was he who had found them. 

On that day, Maedhros had a bruise purpling on his cheekbone from an officer’s lathi. He had been two years younger than Elwing, who was herself too young to have ever been there. He’d been in his very-late teens: one hand, dead father, a set of brothers who held on to his every word. Amrod and Amras, whom their mother had taken up north to her sculptor friends in Calcutta, who had been so young, who had missed each other, gotten on different trains in the wrong directions and presumed dead. Amme, who undertook a hunger strike to the death, one misreported as a death-by-famine because his Amme had worn a hijab and women who wore hijabs had not the political acumen to understand hunger strikes. That had been the boy who found Elrond and Elros. 

They had been crying wearily, and when Maedhros squatted near them they had looked at him curiously, and he them. They were fair and grey-eyed and though Maedhros would only realise whose sons these were when the newspapers printed the tragic story of the sisterfucking-chutiya Viceroy’s sisterfucking-chutiya secretary’s missing twins, he had known even then that these were English boys. The two had unusually long hair, fanning out across their bright-pink tear-wet faces, so muddied it bore the texture and appearance of the seagrass that washed up under the cliff-house in low tide. 

He took them up because nobody else had, and sat there with them for hours wondering who would turn up to reclaim them and what manner of overfriendly parents produced these creatures who, half an hour in, were already clambering over his shoulders, one of them taste-testing his hair and the other one biting his arm (kindly, like he was trying to get the measure of Maedhros). He didn’t want to leave them because they were barely walking, and so he sat there with them, shaking and terrified because they were English boys and the charge was against the Viceroy’s car-parade so they would probably have been quite important, which meant that he, Maedhros, would have been in for it once they were discovered with him. 

But nobody did, and he hadn’t known why, so when Maglor stole someone’s bike and eventually came looking, he found his brother chainsmoking while reluctantly feeding two small toddlers milky coffee, and he gave Maedhros such an earful about giving toddlers inappropriate food that Maedhros had risen to the bait because fuck off Maglor, you think they’ll grow up stunted because I gave them a glass of coffee? Was that what happened to you, asshole? You know their people have fucking snow? They live in fucking ice houses. Coffee won’t kill them. The two of them made their long way home, riding tandem on the stolen bike with twins in tow, still arguing about what they could and couldn’t be fed. Which is to say: the two of them had been young enough to argue over such things for so long. 

Maedhros blinks, realises hours and hours have gone by. His cheeks are raw from the sea-salted wind. “I am his father,” he says again. He thinks of his own father. He clings to the last time he saw him. It is a wonderful image. It is just. It is what they had deserved. How mesmerising he had been. And then Maedhros hears quiet voices, turns, sees figures illuminated by nothing other than moonlight. Maglor, and Elrond behind him.

Each has a small, sleeping twin in his arms, heads lolling on their shoulders. Maglor looks stern, intent on something he cannot place at the moment. Elrond’s face is blotchy and tearstained, a sodden handkerchief crumpled in his hand — he knows now, Maedhros realises with a pang of terror. But there’s not a shred of blame in his son’s eyes, only the heartrending knowledge of what it is to lose a child, knowing they would not be lost, had you not been their father. Maglor passes Elrohir to Elrond without a word, and moves to stand next to his brother. Elrond stands a few feet behind the two. None of them say a word.  

And then Maglor passes Maedhros a scarf, says softly: “take this. Cover your head.” 

“What?” His voice feels unreal even to himself. He takes the scarf regardless. 

“We know now,” Maglor says steadily. “At least there is that. Come. I will lead.” 

Each homecoming is an act of reckoning, Elrond realises, standing on the shore watching Maedhros and Maglor wash their faces, their feet, tall silhouettes bent over the Arabian sea. Diasporic return is never as joyous as it looks: tables creaking under feasts, singing, dancing, gifts, woodsmoke, all smokescreens to cover up the fact that all of you, here and there, have been desperately yearning for a thing that no longer exists in the same form you remember it in. The old river had died years ago: the zeitgeist of the nation’s race to bleed itself drier than the British ever could dream of. And yet it is still a time of understanding, amidst the repetitive cacophony of comings-and-goings that has become your life, that there is still a refuge for you, here, away from the writhing world. It may have taken on a new, incomprehensible form — but it is here.

Across the years Elrond hadn’t seen him, a compound fracture had formed between his father and the Comrade, like a branch splitting under fruit too long borne. Elrond hadn’t noticed, because the man, after all, is still there—the same heart, the same eyes. There are almost no signs that something crucial had crumbled away within him. 

Mathematically speaking, nothing truly disappears. All of us are fragmented and reassembled versions of the shapes history leaves to us. The way a Naxal unit’s forested territory circles an ancestral exile, the way a clenched fist recalls a forbidden prayer. The world holds its old patterns, never entirely new. Such rhythms are as reassuring as they are terrifying. 

And so the Maedhros who stands before his son today is not one thing but many. He is a struck-down statue. He is a fading demon. He is a sword in a nuclear war. He is historical debris. He is the first sunset of the Empire’s apocalypse. He is the sum of a nation’s ruin. He is Elrond’s Baba, the terrorist, who would find him under every starless sky. The archives will dissect him. The historians will redeem him. And writers will swallow him whole.

Salat al-Janazah begins with a takbir — the phrase Allahu akbar (here, presented in its purest form, untouched by newsprint), God is great. And then, al-Fatiha. 

Maedhros and Maglor do not believe. This much is true. The sand on their bare soles is cold and soothing. They wash their feet, their hands, their face, say the takbir. Elrond stands a little way behind them, holding the twins’ hands, watching silently. Maglor and Maedhros bend their heads, raise their wrists to chest level, palms up as though holding a book. They fill each takbir — Allahu Akbar — with offerings, gifts, memories. They bend their faces to the earth, begin the al-Fatihah. Maedhros wraps the scarf loosely about his head, ties it off. He bows his head. The roar of the waves is relentless. He starts to weep, but he keeps going with the takbirs. 

Ya Allah. They buried my boy like a dog, o Allah, they buried him like a dog, he was my boy. My boy. 

Maglor turns to him: “Ikka, you are the elder. You lead the duaa, the prayer, for him.”

Another offering, brother to brother. Maedhros nods. These words he knows. He has said them for his father, his mother. 

“Ya Allah, forgive my Elros, and elevate his station among those who are guided,” he begins, and continues. He is the wind, circling his son. Centred around his father. He touches his forehead to his wrists again, as he continues. Something untraps itself, unwinds, circles the five of them, curls up into the air like smoke. 

Maedhros knows this from older griefs: the intense overwhelm that can strike any time — weeks, months, years — after a monumental loss. The palimpsest of burial shrouds hung all over the house, the last threads between you and the loved one. The more devastating the loss, the greater the relief that something still chains them to you, and the harder the wrenching-away. Every misplaced shoe, old scarf and half-read book is a tiny, self-contained exhumation. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. Ya Allah, wa fsah lahu fi qabri, wa nawwir lahu fi. To You he belongs, to You he returns. Forgive us and him, o Lord of the Worlds. He touches each relic with these sounds: he does not understand all the words, only some, does not truly believe in them, but he keeps going regardless, the vice around his chest loosening. 

 “Widen his —“ Maedhros tries to finish, but he cannot go on. He cannot stop crying. Maglor continues in his stead, as if nothing had broken. As if the tension of the past five years has crumbled to ash between them. 

“Forgive us and him, O Lord of the worlds,” he says. “Forgive him, strengthen him, and strengthen us to bear his loss. Widen our Elros’ grave, and illuminate it for him, so he will not wander alone in the dark.”

Maglor breathes deeply, turns to his brother. “Al-Fatiha again.” 

Maedhros shakes his head, weeping. He can’t get the words out. He cannot end this. He is afraid the ground beneath his feet cannot take the intensity of this ending. But he is exhausted of old hatred. He taught Elros to swim on this very shore. He never wanted to leave. He came back, and it was the hardest thing his boy had ever done, leaving his brother behind. Every shore is a sundering shore for men like his sons. And so he gets the words out, though they take him a while: bismillahi Rahmani Raheem. In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. 

They stand in silence. And then one of the twins sneeze, sniffle — the silence breaks. Elrond murmurs something about taking the children back inside, something about the cold, and presses a hand on his Baba’s back. You have done nothing wrong, he tries to say with it. You have been wronged. Maedhros nods. He can’t get the words out, but Elrond — like his brother —- knows. And then it is just Maglor and Maedhros on the shore for the longest time. From the back, in the dark, almost two boys who found two boys. At some point, though he cannot place when, Maedhros’ tears dry up.  

“I’ll call his mother tomorrow,” he says at last, hoarsely. “She should know also. Her son too, he is. I don’t know how she’ll react, I’m…”

“No need,” Maglor responds, low. “She knows.”

“I see. You told her?”

“No,” Maglor’s voice wavers. “We didn’t. Elrond called her to do so, to tell her, it’s why we were late to get down here to you. But she’d known for years. That’s why he was crying like that — that’s why he was so upset. He wasn’t upset at you. She knew for years, it seems. Not about the body, ikka, but about… how he was killed. And why.” 

“What?” Maedhros frowns. “She can’t have known, Maglor. That isn’t true. She… she and I had been talking, actually quite often these past days. She was perfectly friendly with me, we were joking around, she was even complaining about her son! I don’t think, if she really did know, she would have been like that.” 

“But she did know. She worked for the foreign office in their country, she has connections. A few months after he died, she got the details sent through: she just didn’t tell Elrond.”

"But why?"

Maglor shakes his head, shrugging. “I don’t know. According to Elrond, what I got out of him… she just said because your father knelt four times for my son, and my husband did not kneel once for his own. I don’t know what she means by it, nor does Elrond… her husband has been dead for years, Elrond never even met him. May have been something to do with what happened after we first found the boys, maybe the reason they did not come hunting for them. Maybe you can ask her, I don’t know. All I know is that she said that, and told Elrond that she stands by her decision to not tell him. To not make him think ill of you.” 

Maedhros nods, closes his eyes tight, though he has no tears left. “It’s hard to believe, sometimes. That such kindness can exist there, and such cruelty can exist here. It feels almost unnatural. And so… pointless. That we are standing here, pleading the same thing that bloody Tagore poem begged for, what, over fifty years back?”

“Into that heaven of freedom,” recites Maglor, laughing quietly. “My Father, let my country awake.”

“How much longer?” his brother’s voice is flat, bleak. “How much longer can we go on like this?”

Maglor does not answer. 

“Let’s go home, ikka, it’s cold,” is all he says. They are slow, making up the steep cliff. When Maedhros turns down the road to Fingon’s house, Maglor grasps his elbow. 

“Your shirt is bright red from the back, ikka,” he pinches the collar of the shirt. “Like the damn flag you look. Your Fingon will lose his mind if you go home like that. Come with me. I’ve sent the neighbour’s boy to say you’ll be here, you can explain tomorrow, I’ve asked him to come also. It’s not like we don’t have the room.” 

He steers his brother up the path to the cliff-house, talking quietly all the while.

 “I’ve not put dinner away yet, so go to the dining room and get something inside you now. It’s puttu and stew only, our Queen Elizabeth still has not built his spice tolerance back up, but it’s filling at least. I’ll go out to the well, draw and heat up some water, you’re shivering. And you need to change out of those clothes after you bathe. You’ll find some of your old shirts in the laundry room, just shake out the mothballs.” 

“Maglor — I —“ Maedhros starts, as they climb the stairs to the porch. The swords and shield are near invisible in the dark, but they are there. 

“I hope you weren’t expecting to sleep on the porch in this weather. It’s freezing, and you’re not sixteen. Fast, fast, come in, you’re letting in the draft,” Maglor tuts at Elrond and the twins, fast asleep on the courtyard platforms. He shakes the door a little until it gives. “These three can get pneumonia and die for all I care, I’ve told them a hundred times if I’ve told them once. You come in though, ikka.” 

“Brother, I —“ he stands still, rooted to the spot, just under the crossed swords. “I don’t know what to do.” 

“Not much is the answer,” Maglor reaches out, pulls him through the door. “There are washed sheets in the almirah in your room. We just need to air them out and put them back on the bed. That’s all.” 

Chapter Text

Chapter 9: “Mornings at the Madhouse" 

“I love him,” Celebrían declares fervently. “He’s unhinged. I don’t know what the hell is going on in his head, but I love whatever it is. He's never been like this on the phone when we used to call. We spoke for almost an hour, I was just calling to make sure I had the address right to note down at immigration, and he just… didn’t shut up. I have never met anyone this mad. He called Jimmy Carter “a squirrel that stores goat droppings in his cheeks instead of nuts”. Told me that he developed the world’s most effective mosquito repellent in prison and would have patented it if they’d let him. I love him, Elrond, I fucking love him. How on earth were you walking around in corduroy trousers and owning monogrammed towels at university when that was the nutcase who raised you?” 

“I would ask who picked up the phone yesterday, but I feel like I know the answer already, considering only one person in this house turns every phone call into an hour-long monologue. And no, I don't know what's going on in his head either… though I'm sure the answer is buried somewhere in the DSM-II,” Elrond laughs into the phone, stretching out on the sofa and peering at the doorway to check that he wasn’t in Maglor’s (who had a personal hatred against people putting their feet up on the sofa) line of sight. “And him having got you on the line explains a lot. He went on a tangent last night after dinner about how ‘certain people’s wives’ spoke cleaner, slang-free Malayalam than ‘certain people’ who were born and brought up in this country… as if the man doesn’t add the word “fucker” into every sentence. I should have known, but I just assumed he was talking about Uncle Curufin, his current target.” 

“He’s asked me to bring in a few sets of long trousers because he says you’re walking around town in your boxers. Elrond. I feel like we’re at a point where we can’t excuse such behaviour as a side-effect of grief. You need to stop doing that. Also, Curufin? The banker? Are all your uncles home, then?”

“I was wearing shorts. He has some sort of vendetta against them… and yes, the banker. Actually, they’re all back. It’s Eid in a few weeks and since Baba and Fingon are back living at the house, well, most of the time at least, they’ve all decided to show up at once. Abba… Maglor, that is, is going insane.”

Maglor had indeed spent the last few weeks going insane, but it had been the sort of petite, softly-furred insanity you'd keep in your pocket and stroke occasionally to make sure it was still there. A small, beloved pet hamster with rabies. Two days after Maedhros agreed to start staying at the Library again, Fingon drove up in his little Ambassador, parked it in the kennel, and dragged three suitcases into the house. "Package deal, queenfucker," Maedhros had said, when Elrond asked if Fingon would also be staying there on the nights his partner did. And then Elrond, displaying a steadfastly English tendency to not learn from his mistakes, had asked Fingon if he needed to lug over three entire suitcases, considering the two of them still spent at least a couple of nights each week in Fingon’s house. For the crime of asking stupid questions, Fingon set Elrond to work unpacking said suitcases. 

Curufin had turned up a week later, claiming to be bored at home after his wife Deepika made the inexplicable decision to disguise herself as a man and go on a pilgrimage to the Sabarimala temple (she was Hindu, hence the pilgrimage itself wasn't particularly problematic, but rather the fact that the temple in question did not permit women to enter, making Deepika’s impromptu religious fervor as much protest as it was prayer). When Maglor asked him why he didn’t just stay at his son's house twenty minutes away, Curufin congratulated him for the splendid idea, and invited Celebrimbor to come stay in the cliff-house as well. 

Caranthir and Haleth turned up three days after that with neither announcement nor invitation, simply walking in at three in the morning and occupying the former's old bedroom. When Maedhros asked them why, Caranthir claimed they wanted to welcome Elrond's wife once she arrived and had apparently misread the date. Haleth told him to mind his own business, asking “why do you want to know? Are you going to start making little ticks in our ration booklets everytime we eat dinner under your roof?” Finally, Celegorm - who lived a ten minute walk away - popped up last week claiming to be lonely and declaring it “reeked of conspiracy” that everyone was staying together while he wasn’t. 

It had been strange, these past few weeks, and Elrond had keenly felt the timefuckery of homecoming. He oscillated between Elrond the Foreigner and Little Elrond, and yet found himself unexpectedly fine with the constant rocking motion, because the more time he spent as Elrond the Foreigner and Little Elrond, the less time he had to spend as Elrond with the Dead Daughter. Still, the topic came up every so often. 

"There's a mass call for the Vice Chancellor to resign," Cel sighs down the line. "Led by dear Ereinion of course, and interestingly, there's local pressure for it as well, not just student-staff. Even that butcher you cried in (still gives me immense secondhand embarrassment to even walk past the place, Elrond, for fuck’s sake), the one in the covered market, has a 'VC OUT' poster on his stall, and that man hated students and had to deal with you. So it does show something's stirring locally, I suppose. Especially after the inquiry published their results."

"Right," Elrond frowns. He has no love to spare for the VC, considering he was the one who personally ordered Elrond's termination (which, technically speaking, he deserved, but that is besides the point) but public calls for resignation were unusual, even factoring Gil-galad into the equation. "What exactly is the issue? Surely it's not the statue debacle again? Ereinion mentioned last week that the University Senate refused all three petitions against its re-installment. Said they'll be putting it back up next month. So what's the problem?"

"I told you — it's the inquiry. I went into the BBC office last week to hand in my extended leave notice and we got talking, seems quite a lot of the press coverage after the inquiry has been, well, scathing… and apparently the board have called him in too. Not about the statue, the bastards will be putting it back up, Ereinion's right, but about the fire itself. Remember, the VC had given multiple press briefings after the fire… all those statements accusing her… accusing Arwen… of setting the fire? Well, as you can imagine, after the inquiry, he's being hung out to dry."

"I see. Well, these reviews take forever… but if he does end up having to resign. Perhaps it might mean it wasn't all for nothing." 

"Oh, Elrond," Cel says quietly. "I wish you would talk…"

"No, Cel. Please. We'll talk about it later. It's fine. There's nothing we can do, it's happened." 

Several months after the incident itself, the inquiry into the fire had been printed in the locals as an item of mild intrigue: the blaze in Fuller Hall had not, it seemed, been deliberately set by Arwen Undomiel as initially presumed. There had been three pages then, detailing the failings of multiple electrical safety reviews, something-something shoddy insulation, though it was not ruled out that the fire may not have been caused by the student in question, and that it was likely caused by her — just not by setting, or attempting to set, the statue on fire. Elrond had been too angry to read much of it properly. The results, in the end, were the same: Arwen was dead, she shouldn't have been in that place at that time regardless of intent, and the statue remained standing. Still, even the symbolic value of it having been taken away was a blow — one that Elrond threw into the kitchen fireplace, much like his father Maedhros had done with the cheque he sent five years ago. 

"All right. All right, then," she shoves out a breath, forcibly changing the subject. "Now, are you coming to pick me up? I land at Cochin, and if I remember, that's about five or six hours from where you are?"

"Eight, actually, on these roads," Elrond snorts. "Well, Madam BBC, you speak Malayalam so well, according to Baba, you can hop on a KSRTC bus and come here yourself, can't you?" 

"Elrond, don't you dare!"

"I'm joking, I'm joking, you'll be picked up from the airport. Oh, I can’t wait to see you, Cel, I’ve missed you ever so much. Now, I’m not coming because I’m not tempting the carsickness gods, but they’ll arrive in Fingon’s car, it’s…"

"Yes, yes, a white Ambassador with a KL license plate. Fingon's car this, Fingon's car that… every single one of you I've spoken to in the last fortnight has mentioned Fingon's car at least once. Elrond, is that poor man's vehicle a public good?" 

"Well, as far as the extended Fëanorian family is concerned, and by that I include the neighbours as well, yes, Fingon's car absolutely is a form of public transport," Elrond tries to verbally convey a shrug, before giving up. "Anyway, Maglor's insisted on joining him because he wants to be the first to meet you in-person before his brothers scare you away for good, which probably means the twins are going along too. Celegorm was threatening to come too, just to piss Fingon off, but even if he doesn't, you'll have… well. A bit of an entourage."

He sits with his eyes closed for a while after the call ends, and tries to draw himself back into the cliff-house, only the cliff-house. Such compartmentalisations have begun come easier to him, and he finds himself no longer needing to construct an enormous pyre reeking of third-culture nostalgia. Nowadays, they are easily triggered by recent sparks of memory, little incidents he didn't have to augment with the imagination. 

Like Maedhros limping home two nights before, having twisted his knee from one of the scuffles he had gotten into on the day, and sitting heavily on the porch platform beside him. Elrond had put aside the notebook he’d been scribbling in and gave his father an earful about overexerting himself, before heading to the laundry cabinet to fetch something that had always been called “that Chinese medicine” in their house: a small red tube with an illustrated dragon, which stung to hell and back when first applied but was almost magical in its ability to soothe strained muscles. Midway through Elrond's ministrations, Maedhros had gotten bored of sitting still (a regular occurence) and swiped his son's notebook from the neat pile of books beside the platform. 

“Absolutely not!” Elrond laughed, snatching it back with a very minty hand. “Privacy! It exists, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. And what on earth do you have to write that I can’t see, hm? Love letters to the chicken shop girl? Should I be calling your wife?”

"No! I told you, I was working on a novel, didn't I?" 

"Then why can't I read it?" Maedhros had commanded. "What is it you're writing? Is it something dirty? Elrond, I swear my father will rise from the dead, possess my body and kick your head in once he hears that there is pornography being written under his roof, and written by a sahib to boot. He'd probably have me kick my own head in afterwards, for letting it happen." 

"It's not a dirty book, it's just… a book. About rivers and that."

"Dirty rivers?" Maedhros grinned, unable to resist a final nudge. "OK, OK, joking. Tell me, what river?" 

"Oh, some nonsensical, loneliness-of-return monologue," Elrond waved his notebook awkwardly. "Nobody writes a killer debut, and technically I have debuted with the children's book, but I feel like I'm still allowed a bit of mopey self-indulgence. An attempt to organise my rather fucked-up sense of patriotism… or the lack of it, I suppose. Changed nation, changed self, that sort of thing."  

"Eh? What patriotism? To India? Boy, you've not stepped foot in this country for years." 

"That being the point." 

"Patriotism has fuckall to do with what you feel for this country," Maedhros informed him, even though Elrond hadn't asked. "It has even less to do with what I feel for it."

"Perhaps you're right about me, but you spent a good half of your life resisting the British occupation. Hell, you happily accepted a prison sentence for the same. Deserved or not, there must have been some level of patriotism involved, no matter how embarrassing it is to admit it now."

"No, there wasn't, and don't you forget who it was that sent me to prison. How many times have I told you, hm?" Maedhros motioned his son away from his knee, began flexing it himself as the paste started to take effect, and held up a finger. Elrond raised his eyebrows, sensing the presence of an incoming Maedhros-monologue. "I always say, don't I? Patriotism is nothing but sexed-up selfishness. Pig in a flag-coloured dress, Elrond. You can put that in your book, actually. Find a pen, write it down right now. Sexed-up, self-interested pig in a dress. You can make the English translation yourself. The problem is this: a sexy pig in a dress is still a pig. Or would be, if pigs made a habit of eating themselves alive after escaping the slaughterhouse. Like it spent so long in the pens it can’t distinguish food from shit. I wasn't a patriot, Elrond, I was hungry."

"But I'm not. You know I'm far from hungry, Baba," Elrond rolled his eyes, laughing as he wiped his hands of the ointment and sat on the platform next to his father, looking out into the courtyard. "Lost, maybe, but not hungry." 

"I agree. You're not hungry, you're famished. Starving fucker, that's you. You, Elrond, are Gandhi after three weeks in a room with me and Fingon." 

It may be necessary to provide a contextual explanation here, for the readers lucky enough to not be exposed to Maedhros and Fingon’s favourite joke, the one they re-told and re-enacted practically on a monthly basis for the last few decades until every member of the Fëanorian family knew it by-heart. The two had come up with the routine in their late teens as a comedy skit for the state Youth Festival, an event attended that year by a conglomerate of high-up Congress politicians, inclusive of Jawaharlal Nehru, who would later become Prime Minister, a man famed for a pathologically neoliberal approach to socialism and an impressively Oedipal devotion to Gandhi. 

The routine was as simple as it was disrespectful, and sat neatly in the annals of Kerala Communists’ illustrious record of Below-the-Belt Gandhi Jokes. It went as such: a third party, usually Maglor, would lie back on a couch, pretending to be Gandhi on one of his “I will be fasting until my people showcase their undying love for me and stop hurting each other on the basis of religion” spells. 

Maedhros and Fingon would walk onto the stage, introducing themselves as a Muslim and a Christian, which was technically true. They would then sit facing each other, keeping up a steady patter of polite conversation, at one point even trying to get their fictional son and daughter married to each other. The fake-Gandhi would then sit up, looking pleased at their getting along and calling for an end to his fast, only for Maedhros to produce a brightly coloured plastic cricket bat, call Fingon an godless infidel, and smack him on the head with said bat. 

Maglor-Gandhi would then lie back down and the entire charade would repeat, this time with Fingon being the batsman, calling Maedhros a devil-worshipper, and so on and so forth, with the two boys taking turns to hit each other with the bat anytime Gandhi showed any signs of ending his fast. The slapstick routine would continue until three weeks were said to have passed onstage, whereupon it ended with Gandhi giving up on any ideas of a religious harmony centred around a love for him, jumping off the couch and running into the audience, calling for a heaped plate of mutton biryani as he fled. 

To this day, it is said in Kozhikode that Nehru’s abysmal handling of the South Indian states after Independence and his insistence on imposing Hindi over their regional languages, had less to do with his ignorance about the states in question, and more to do with the fifteen unforgettable minutes he spent watching Maedhros and Fingon’s Youth Festival skit.

Maedhros, in the end, had convinced Elrond to read out a page from his book and Elrond did so, mostly because his father could be extremely annoying when he wanted to be, though there was also an I-went-to-Oxford element of wanting-tutorial-critique to it. "Read it slowly, I won't understand if you read English so fast," Maedhros had warned him, and Elrond had read out the page in Malayalam instead. It was deliberately touristic, references to "hugely green" foliage and patchwork imagery carefully laid out to resemble a child's playroom rendition of what they thought a river might look like. When you looked closer, you'd realise the rocks were made of candied-brick, sugar-spun whitewater and all. That sort of thing: a self-aware detachment, a conscious construct. 

ചിലപ്പോഴൊക്കെ, മുന്നറിയിപ്പില്ലാതെ, ഞാൻ നദിയെ ഓർക്കുന്നു - മുഴുവനായല്ല, മറിച്ച് കഷണങ്ങളായി: വെള്ളത്തിന്റെ കുത്തൊഴുക്ക്, ആഴം കുറഞ്ഞ പ്രദേശങ്ങളിലെ മത്സ്യബന്ധനത്തിന്റെ ശബ്ദം, മഴയ്ക്ക് ശേഷം അതിന്റെ തീരങ്ങളിൽ നിന്ന് വരുന്ന പച്ചപ്പിന്റെ ഗന്ധം. അത് എന്നെന്നേക്കുമായി ഞങ്ങളുടെ ജീവിതത്തെ മറികടന്ന് കടന്നുപോകുമെന്ന് ഞാൻ വിശ്വസിച്ചു. ഞങ്ങൾ നഗ്നപാദരായി, വെയിലേറ്റ് പൊള്ളലേറ്റു, അതിന്റെ ഒഴുക്കിലേക്ക് ഒഴുകിപ്പോയി, അത് ഞങ്ങളെ മികച്ച സ്ഥലത്തേക്ക് കൊണ്ടുപോകുമെന്ന് തോന്നുന്നു. ഇപ്പോൾ അത് പോയി. അല്ലെങ്കിൽ, അത് അവിടെയുണ്ട്, പക്ഷേ ഒരു നദിയല്ലാതെ മറ്റൊന്നുമല്ല. മറന്നുപോയ കാര്യങ്ങളുടെ ഒരു കിടങ്ങ്. ഞാൻ അതിലൂടെ കടന്നുപോകുമ്പോൾ നോക്കാതിരിക്കാൻ ശ്രമിക്കുന്നു.

Sometimes, without warning, I remember our river—not in whole, but in fragments: the slap of water, fish-belly in the shallows, the hugely green smell of its banks after rain. I believed it went on forever, winding past our houses and all the way across the world. We were barefoot and sun-scorched, flinging ourselves into its current like it could carry us somewhere better. Now it’s gone. Or rather, it’s there but no longer as a river. A ditch of forgotten things. My old Kozhikode, my new eyes. I try not to look when I pass it. 

“Aha, this one is our river, is it not? Well. Was.”

“It is… could you tell?” Elrond flushed. “It is our river—us four, I mean.” 

“I like how far away from it you seem. Honest. That’s honest. I almost did not recognise it, and I think that is what’s good about it. Though I’m not a literary man, as you know. Maglor is the writer.”

“And you’re the reader, don’t start with your 10th-fail shit again,” Elrond waved away the protests. “Good, I’m glad. I wanted it to sound a little artificial.”

“That it did. And it was sad, too, the artificiality. Like you’re a pallbearer at some stranger’s funeral. Like you jumped in that river, climbed back out, and realised you were bone-dry. Correct?” 

"I feel like you've put it better than I ever could," Elrond nudged his father. "Maybe you should write the book instead of me."

“No, no, they'll write books about me. I won't need to lift a bloody finger. And very good translation,” Maedhros nodded appreciatively, pretending to clap one-handed. “Nicely done, you've got the casual-poetic form down perfectly. Maglor will be impressed. And I’m sure the English version is just as good.” 

“Oh, no,” Elrond laughed. “No, I wrote it in Malayalam in the first place. It probably wouldn’t read very well in English, and this… well. The whole book wouldn’t read well in English, frankly speaking.” 

Maedhros blinked, confused. “Eh? What, so you’re… Your novel, you are writing it in Malayalam? The whole book? Or you will translate it to English afterwards?” 

“Well, yes, it would be odd if I just have one chapter in Malayalam, wouldn’t it? And no, there wouldn't be any translation to English. Unless it becomes a bestseller which, believe me, it won't." 

“Who the hell will read a Malayalam book in England? All these prizes and all, they don’t… even Indian Sahitya Akademi prizes, usually it goes to English or Hindi, Maglor was saying. Sometimes Bengali.”

“I’m not exactly writing to win the Nobel Prize, Baba,” Elrond rolled his eyes. “No, I thought… for my first novel, I thought Malayalam would be the right language to do it in. Yes, nobody would read it in England, but I could get it published here. And it has always come to me easier than English, I can say more with it… and well, technically speaking, it is my first language. We didn’t exactly speak much more English than our names when you found us. Unless you think it's… I don't know. Presumptuous?”

“No…” Maedhros’ green eyes were wide, surprised. “No, I don't. It was us who taught you both Malayalam, wasn’t it? Before school and all, I mean. Maglor and I.”

Elrond shrugged. “Well clearly, you did a pretty good job. But yes, I’m writing it in Malayalam, not English. Although I suppose there will be people getting a bit iffy about a white bloke writing in Malayalam.” 

“I’ll break their damn legs,” Maedhros said dreamily, and then shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it himself. He was silent for a moment, and then first repeated the same thing he had said when his seventeen-year-old son had told him he wanted to be a writer. As if he was too overcome with this sudden (and inexplicable, to Elrond) joy to put together a new set of words. 

“My Elrond will be a writer. My boy is going to write a novel.” He barked out a laugh to himself, then added, even more reverently: “in Malayalam. My Elrond will write a novel in Malayalam.” 

Elrond had looked up at him then, confused, and found that he couldn’t take his eyes off Maedhros’ face. 

He was smiling, yes, but that wasn't it. His father had always smiled easy, laughed easier. Almost every meal at the cliff-house, these days but also when Elrond was younger, tended to be marked by Maedhros’ raucous cackling at either some joke he made himself, or some inventive vulgarity he’d constructed about either his brothers or the global palimpsest of people who irritated him. But this was different. This wasn't curated madness, wasn't him chuckling at his own wit, this was reflexive and its reflexivity utterly captivating. 

"You seem happier about the language than the book," Elrond awkwardly nudged Maedhros again, to break the unexpected sentimentality of the moment. "Just five minutes ago you were going on about pig-flavoured patriotism and what not." 

"You could write about chickens scratching in shit, Elrond, and I'd be happier about the language than the book. That it's my son, and my language." 

"You shouldn't give me that much credit. It's not like I chose Malayalam for some political reason. It just fits the best, that's all. I speak only two languages, you know, well, two and a half if you count Hindi."

"Me too. Maybe two, half-and-half English and Hindi. Though I have only ever wanted to speak one — this one. But why? Why not English? I understand Malayalam is easier for you, but you have already written a book about Kerala in English. Your children’s stories.”

“The children’s stories were rubbish.”

“I’m sure they weren’t bad. Maglor told me how nicely it was written.”

“Did you read them?” he asked quietly.

It was Maedhros’ turn to flush. “No. No, I did not.”

“Why not?” 

“Time. And I didn’t know where to buy it. It’s not like you sent one here, is it?”

“No, but I’ve been here for months, and so have two dozen copies. And I know you have one. Why haven’t you read it?”

“I didn’t understand,” his father admitted, sighing. “The first story itself, I didn’t understand. Why those fish in that story could speak to the girl, and why she could understand them, I didn’t… could not understand the meaning. And it said on the front itself, the book was for ten year old children. And if even that I couldn’t understand, then, well. I decided not to read it. Was too difficult. And I did not want to not-understand it. But that’s not your fault, Elrond, you know my English is not so good.”

“Exactly,” Elrond turned to his pile of books, picking out a copy of Sea Stories. “I taught in Oxford of all places, did all my degrees there, and yet my father is the biggest reader I have ever known. He’s read translations of everything from the Upanishads to Tolstoy. He could quote bloody Dante in Malayalam. If my children’s stories made a man like that feel stupid, over a book about his hometown, then I feel I have failed as a writer. And this here… it has either failed as a book, or never was a book in the first place.” 

“I see. But these stories were not written for me, boy,” Maedhros said gently, taking it from Elrond and tracing the art on the front cover with his fingernail. Flying fish, fishing boat. “It was written for your daughter. For children in England more broadly, and I know it sold well, Maglor said. I’m sure they can understand what the fish are saying, and why.”

“No, they don’t understand what the fish are saying. I don’t understand what the fish are saying. But it sold because the fish talked. It’s the only way it could have sold, it's… it's the way I sold it.”

“The only way?”

“Stories about Kerala wouldn’t sell in England if the fish didn’t talk,” Elrond explained. “If the heroes and villains didn’t have… oh, I don’t know, pointy ears. Pointy ears, maybe tails and claws. Living in a world different from our own, but the talking fish think their world is normal, think all its strange happenings are commonplace. And it makes us a little uncomfortable, this fish world, makes us question our own.”

“Magical realism, Baba. That’s what they’re starting to call it. A rather new term when applied in this way, and not really used about children’s literature at the moment, so I told myself I was doing something remarkable, novel, when in fact it was just... Well. It was great marketing. In the end, it's the same as those realist stories about India, the ones from when we were kids: the page after page about what shit on the street smells like, how terribly miserable everyone is, and have I mentioned the shit? So abased, so monotonous… low and indestructible form of life, like Forster wrote. But talking fish stink too, I'm starting to realise." 

That was, at the end of the day, what Sea Stories had been, like all the other Sea Stories of the sixties. They were stories about other worlds, strange worlds with sentient plants and chatty animals, where the beings could (if they tried very hard and were guided very well) one day become just like us. It was the hallmark of the great writer, rendering the unimaginable, civilising the muddle, gently gathering a fishpond full of talking carp into a neatly woven net. In such stories, men like Elrond’s father were as silent as they were beautiful, their grey-green eyes incongruous and alluring at once. The hero of the Sea Stories, Little Arwen’s Genie in the Jar, had such grey-green eyes. It never said a word to Little Arwen, though she knew what it meant anyway. 

In this world however, the only time Elrond had ever seen anyone call his father’s eyes beautiful, a shalwar salesman on SM Street who commented on his “cat eyes” when he had been around eight, he and Elros had also been privy to the street brawl of the week. 

“Another word about my face, I will strangle you with your own fucking silk, you cocksucking bastard,” Maedhros had roared at the salesman, who had only meant well. He’d dragged the man out of his shop, battered him halfway to hell, and then told him that if he ever dared to look at him again, let alone even think about commenting on his appearance, he’d personally set fire to his house. He didn’t explain to either boy why exactly he had lost his cool, and neither of them bothered to ask, because Maedhros losing his cool with someone on the street was far from being a rare occurrence. 

“He’d internalised it, I expect,” Elros had said a couple decades later, on a visit to England, his tone accidentally superior (or it had seemed that way to Elrond at least). “Doesn’t want to seem like a queer in public—that must have been it. Though I’ve not seen him that angry towards people who did actually comment on his sexual preferences or intimate life, unless they called Fingon a chaandupottu or something like that. But in general, those were somewhat half-hearted beatings, compared to that one on SM Street.”

“Or maybe,” Elrond had frowned, disliking the way Elros acted as if only he knew their father these days (he didn’t act so, but still). “Maybe it’s the eyeliner. He may have thought the man was commenting on it in a religious sense, pointing it out, you know. He did specifically mention his eyes.”

Both of them had, of course, been wrong. 

"Magical realism, hm?" Maedhros nods. "Like Khasak, I see now. Are you sure it's that new, this style? Khasak was ten years ago, but written in Malayalam." 

Elrond hadn't known what Khasak was, and so Maedhros explained: Khasak was short for Khasakkinte Itihasam, which translated to The Legend of Khasak, a serialised Malayalam novel which, in the literary circles of Kerala, was regarded as one of the first works of postmodernist magical realism in South Asia, first serialised only a year after the famously canonised One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published by Marquez. The book, Maedhros told him, ticked all the boxes of magical realism Elrond had defined, and more besides: it had been the story of a young man who, after an affair with his stepmother, jetted off to a village straight out of the average modernist's nightmares, where legend and myth collided unevenly with the political volatility of the state at the time. 

“Yes, Baba. Just like Khasak,” Elrond nodded afterwards, his voice cracking under his smile. “That's it. That's exactly why I can't… it's exactly what I mean. Nobody in my department—English, at Oxford—would have heard of Khasak. And I hadn't either, as much as I tried to keep up with the literature. I can't… I don't think anyone in Oxford had read it, not even the Socialists."

"Well, that's because it wasn't a socialist book," Maedhros winked at him. "It's the same as your one only. Your children's book, and that definition you gave… it was about discontent. And at the time, it had been our people in power only, the Communists, that is. That doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile novel, and it's Oxford's fault if nobody has read it in your college. Keeping aside Marx and Engels' bibliographies, it would be… hm. My second favourite book."

"Do you have a copy? I'd like to read it."

"No," Maedhros' face tightened. "I don't have my copy… a copy, I mean." 

"Why not? Do you mean it's at Fingon's place? You could just get it when you both stay there next, couldn't you? Or I could go get it." 

"No, no, I… lent it out," Maedhros' face seized with pain as he tripped over his words uncharacteristically, not meaning for the next lie to follow. "Ah… to.. to someone in your college, actually." 

"What?" Elrond asked. "Who on earth do you know well enough in Oxford to go around lending books to?" 

"It's…" his father flushed again, and then paled. "Actually…" 

"Fuck me, is it Ereinion?" and then, when Maedhros looked confused, he clarified. "Your gay best friend." 

Maedhros, at that point, did some very quick thinking, flustered as he was. He had, technically speaking, sent Gil-galad a book last week. Unfortunately, it wasn't Khasakkinte Itihasam, it was in fact Shabdangal—Sound-–by Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who lived a ten minute drive from the cliff-house, in Beypore district. It was a terrifying, remarkably written nightmare of a book, an auditory hellscape, a sexcapade of queerness galore, wanton and wonderful. Maedhros had gotten annoyed with Gil-galad rattling off all the works of gay literature his colleagues and friends had put out in the last decade and sent him the book wrapped in brown paper, with English words carefully written out by Celegorm:

My friend wrote this one. Biggest gay book in the world. Have fun reading. Asshole. 

The good Comrade, of course, was perfectly aware that Gil-galad spoke no Malayalam, and that he was incredibly unlikely, considering Elrond was currently in the cliff-house, to know anyone good enough with Malayalam to translate the complex literary form of the language. He did not send the book despite it, in fact, it was the only thing that made him fork out for the very-expensive international parcel delivery in the first place. Have fun reading, asshole was the closest he could get to slapping the man. Unfortunately, Gil-galad, having spent too many years of his life at Oxford, considered such literary catfights not only a part of life, but extremely enjoyable. 

Fortunately, however, Gil-galad's inability to understand Malayalam would mean he would have no clue what the book was actually named. Stifling a sigh of relief, Maedhros nodded: "exactly, him. I forgot his name. Yes, your mad gay friend." 

"I mean, he can't speak Malayalam, but I suppose that was your motivation in sending the thing to him in the first place," Elrond snorted, writing down the name of the book for the next time he went to town. "But all right, I'll go get it myself. Might help me in writing my own." 

"Ha!" Maedhros grinned again, looking at him wide-eyed with delight, as if he'd forgotten that his Elrond, his Elrond, was writing a book, in Malayalam. "I swear to you, boy. Fuck your fish. Fuck Khasak. This book, each word, I promise you I'll read each word a hundred times."

Extract from the acknowledgements page of Elrond Peredhel's novel, The Statue Drowners, translated from the Malayalam.

Had anyone taken a photo of me as I looked at Maedhros in that moment, the flickering oil-lamp lighting up the corners of my father’s face, not a single shadow marring his sheer delight, I would not have recognised myself. Maedhros’ expression was cast onto my own, I'm certain, not a mirror-image but a refraction, turning my face almost slack with a newly-surfaced relief. 

Oh, I am loved so instinctively. 

I had been amazed that such barefaced parental devotion could still exist, even for me, who did not deserve it by half. And yes, relief: for in a world where what happened to Elros had happened, if Maedhros Feanorian's face could still form such remarkable shapes, unprompted by anything other than his son's minor linguistic achievement, then maybe there was hope for Elrond Peredhel too, to survive in a post-Arwen world.

A good parent will always put their children’s hunger before their own. My fathers were like that. They have always been like that. That night on the porch, I told Maedhros I wanted to write about our Kozhikode, our rivers, and he had known even then that it was simply a way to write about the cliff-house. That this book, in truth, has no rivers at all. Rivers are but another species of flying fish, another disguise I have shoved onto my father. 

He and his brother taught me and mine this language, and in doing so let us consume a part of them. He let me turn “my Baba, the terrorist” into metaphor, into juxtaposition, let me dismantle him into literary technique and cycle those words across these pages. He didn’t say a word against it. He sat there, smiling at me for so long that tears rose in his eyes, and told me he would read each word a hundred times. He let me swallow him whole. No other grain has sat so gently within me.  

Clearly, the good mood had stayed with Maedhros. 

“Cunt means what?” he asks by way of greeting, Fingon in tow, popping into the dining room where breakfast is being laid out. “Elrond, go get out the Oxford Dictionary. It is an English word, came to me in a dream. Ah, hello twins and Haleth-sahiba, how nice you three look today! C-U-N-T, Elrond, that’s the spelling.”

“Excuse me?” Elrond chokes. 

“Good morning Celebrimbor, dogfucker, Naxalfucker, and Maglor. You, British India, if you won’t get the dictionary then give me the definition. Ten seconds you have.”

“You’ve forgotten me,” someone pipes up from the far end of the table. Maedhros scowls. 

“I have never forgotten a single thing in my life. I can remember what I had for breakfast when I was six months old. I purposely left you out. You know why?”

“Because I work for the State Bank of India and do not deserve to have a single good morning,” Curufin recites, raising his hands in mock piety. "Correct, Lenin-sahib?"

“Um,” Elrond flushes, lowering his voice and side-eyeing Haleth. “That word. It means a woman’s private parts. It’s an awfully chauvinist term, incredibly rude. No real Malayalam equivalent, but it’s used in a similar way to myran, your favourite word.”

(Myran, if the reader has forgotten, translates to “pubic hair”, and is used in the same way as “cunt” or “fucker”, and indeed is, was, and forever will be the eldest Fëanorian’s favourite word, with which he performs daily linguistic acrobatics. For instance, if he were to call someone a ratfucker, it would be eli-myran, and if he were to call someone a treefucker, it would be maram-myran.)

“Elrond!” Maglor exclaims. "Children! How can you say that around the children? And it’s Ramzan, the holy month!”

“I see, thank you, Queen Elizabeth. Good, good English word... I will try it out soon, inshallah,” the Comrade nods appreciatively, flipping open the newspaper. “Incidentally, what time is Finarfin delivering his speech today?” 

“I’m really enjoying Maglor-ikka talking about Ramzan,” Haleth tells her husband. “As if he’s fasting from sunrise to sunset praying five times a day, and not on his second helping of chicken stew at ten in the morning.”

"I'm the problem?" Elrond turns to Maglor, half-annoyed and half-amused. "Your beloved brother just walked into the room calling someone a dogfucker and asking what the word cunt mea—"

"There, look, he's saying it again!" Curufin smacks the table. "Celebrimbor, what did I tell you about foreign countries? The wild West, see what it does. How disrespectful." 

"Ab-ss—abssolutely," Celebrimbor winks at Elrond. "I hear that's how he refers to his mother as well. My dear Mummy, C-U-N-T, bring me coffee!" 

"Good rhyming scheme to that one, actually," Maglor nods approvingly. "And it makes sense, Elrond running his house like a little dictator. That's why nobody there has spoken to him about his 'shorts' problem." 

"My mother doesn't even live with us!" 

"Why not, asshole?" Haleth chimes in, Caranthir nodding away beside her. "Even though she didn't raise you, she's still your bloody mother. You're letting her starve on the street?" 

"Damn right, Haleth-sahiba. Why not, asshole?" Maedhros growls at his son, handing an egg to Celegorm to be peeled for him, as part of some decade-long bet the latter had lost. "You can't look after her in her old age also? What are you going to do tomorrow, stick her in a nursing home? Maglor, make sure not a single cent of this house goes to this ungrateful bastard, he'll pocket it and sell you to the butcher when you become too feeble to walk." 

"She's barely two years older than you, and you've spent the last month turning Mankavu district into no-man's-land. And she's richer than all of us combined. She's not exactly starving on the street, you don't need to worry about your new best friend." 

"Not richer than Curufin, though, is she?" Caranthir blows a kiss to his brother at the far end of the table. "Fingon, check the paper and see how much the State Bank of India is worth currently." 

"Three rupees and fifty six paise," Fingon rattles off. "Rest is lining dictator-ji's pocket. Maybe a few hundred in Curufin's piggy-bank." 

“Maedhros-uncle, what did you have for breakfast?” Elrohir asks, pulling on Maedhros’ sleeve. “When you were six months old.”

His grandfather doesn’t look up from the newspaper, except to cast a supervisory eye over Celegorm's egg-peeling: “mutton biryani, fried prawns, half a roasted pomfret, aviyal, and six eggs. Three cups of masala chai with breast milk. Porotta and beef fry. Your two appams and glass of milk are miserable compared to that. You will stay three feet tall forever, and it will be all Maglor’s fault.” 

Elladan frowns. “You ate all that? For breakfast? Without teeth?”

"Have you seen the latest Vanitha magazine cover?" Maglor asks Celebrimbor. "They were doing profiles of politicians down in Thiruvanthapuram. You should see if you can get one done, there's a copy in every shitter across Kerala."

"The women's magazine?" Celegorm wrinkles his nose. "What the fuck would Celebrimbor do with a feature in a women's magazine? Don't they regularly put out home-haircut ideas and nail-polish designs? I don't think it's a mark of a serious politician to court features in such worthless magazines." 

"My dear brother," Caranthir leans over the table and smoothly decolonises the tea flask from Elrond’s grip. “Such disrespect. You have been sucking on Maedhros-ikka’s nipples for far too long, he’s rubbing off on you.” 

“I feel like Maedhros-ikka’s nipples should be left out of casual conversation in the interests of my continued lifespan,” Curufin gags. “Celegorm, remember when we started a rumour in school that Ammë hired a hyena as a wet-nurse for ikka, and that’s why he behaves the way he does?” 

“No, sorry, I don’t remember,” Celegorm pulls at the corner of his lip. “And this hole where my canine should be gives me a good idea as to why.”

“Who said I did not have teeth when I was six months old?" Maedhros demands of his grandchildren. "Elladan, Elrohir, simply because you both were abnormally born with no teeth does not mean we are all like that. I was born with 300 teeth, just waiting inside. Allah knew I would live a life where getting teeth knocked out is a common occurrence. At least 176 I have left. Get the encyclopaedia out later and look up the animal named shark. Sraavu in Malayalam, but we don't get the good ones here. Like that, but better.”

Elrond and Maglor catch each other’s eye, stifle a laugh. Maedhros had a habit, when Elrond and Elros were of a similar age, of making up complete nonsense and convincing the boys it was fact. Mice laid eggs, he told them once. And when Elros said he’d never seen a mouse egg in his life, Maedhros went out, bought a packet of mothballs, and told him those were mouse eggs, leading to Elros spending a good six months trying to incubate them in a small box under his bed. 

Maglor sits quietly now, half-listening to Celegorm and Curufin attempt to piece together the events of their schoolyard rumour-spreading and subsequent battering-by-big-brother, to the backing track of four other conversations carrying on at the same time, all demanding his ear. Like a leaky roof in a thunderstorm, each hole demanding to be fixed before the others. Such remarkable rains—one might even find oneself hoping the river may resurrect. Forgive him his little dreams. He has been very lonely these past five years. He catches Elrond’s eye again from across the table, and knows his son is passively probing the same wound he is. Like Celegorm’s missing canine and the memory-gap around it, the lack of Elros at the table is a slippery-copper hole, nudged at every so often. And then they smile at two separate jokes, their eyes unlock, and the moment passes. 

"What shark c–c—-constitutes as —- as g—ood?"

"Kill rate must be over seventy percent, like… what was it? Big white shark. Something like that. Haven't you seen the documentary Jaws?" Maedhros frowns at his nephew. "You should keep up with the news better if you want to be an MP, Celebrimbor. But yes. Good sharks are the ones that do the most killings." 

"Achachan didn't let us watch Jaws," Elladan sighs, shooting his grandfather a dirty look. "Said it was too scary."

"That's because your achachan is scared of fish after catching rabies from my goldfish when he was ten," Maedhros places a comforting hand on Elladan’s back. "It’s OK. Don’t be sad, Jaws wasn’t that good. I would know, I watched it fourteen times. Did you know it was filmed by the old fishpond near Meenchandha? Budget sharks they were. Isn't that right, Finnu?" 

"Did someone say my name?" 

"Ah, I forget," Maedhros shakes his head sadly. "Fingon refuses to talk to anybody today. Maunvratam, vow of silence, apparently. Decided it is Lenting season. Such funny habits, these Catholics. Ramzan-lite.”

“Fingon refuses to talk to Maedhros,” says Fingon pleasantly, adding four heaped spoonfuls of sugar to his second mug of tea. “Not out of religious obligation but simply until Maedhros reverses the decision he made last week to act like a complete lunatic and turn every single moment I drive my car into an exercise in public humiliation.” 

“What?” Elrond peers out of the window. “Your car looks fine. What did he do?”

Fingon glares at his partner. “Sprained his bloody ankle last week kicking some poor man’s door in, couldn’t go on his rounds the next day, and, like a hyperactive and lonely child during the school holidays, got so bored sitting at home and not punching anything that he spent six full hours fiddling about with wires and changing my bloody car horn to the opening notes of Solidarity Forever.”  

“I see no problem here,” Maedhros shrugs innocently, rifling through the casserole to pick out the two largest appams and shoving them onto the twins’ plates. “Eat or you'll look like Elrond, look at his skinny ankles. It’s a great song. You listen to the radio in your car, no? Remember when Fatherfucker Finarfin went around on a lorry blasting some praise the lord speech? This is just like that, but for people who have brains. Right, I'm going to take the phone upstairs, I have a few calls to make to the district representatives, and then I'm off to the Party office. Celegorm, Celebrimbor, I better see both of you there when I get in or there'll be trouble, start walking now. Haleth-sahiba, would you like a lift into town? I'll come ask before I leave, I can drop you off anywhere you like." 

“Why is Baba so nice to Haleth?” Elrond whispers once Maedhros leaves the room, nudging Celegorm. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him being this nice to anyone older than, what, twelve? And I have never heard him refer to a woman using a term as respectful as sahiba, including his literal mother. Does he… like her that much?”

“Oh, no no, like or dislike has nothing to do with it. Ikka is a total asshole to the people he loves most. No, no, my dear nephew. There are two reasons. First, is that he just wants to impress her." 

"She has ears," Haleth lets him know from across the table. "But feel free to continue, she enjoys hearing such things." 

"As you know, your father is a Communist from head to toenail, and treats his terrorism charge like a cricket trophy," Celegorm explains, slipping into his rarely-used tour-guide persona. "However, he is not a Naxal bombing police stations and living in the forest, he is a man whose name is on the deed to an expensive feudal house, who has had someone, be it you or Elros, us brothers, Fingon, or our mother, fetch his tea for him every morning since he was old enough to drink it. Does he terrorise the opposition? Absolutely. Of course, half the opposition in Kozhikode are school teachers, vicars and bankers. It's very easy to find and fuck with those kneecaps… Grade 4 asshole behaviour. Haleth, however, is the real deal. Grade 10 asshole. Not Caranthir, Caranthir is just some depressed fucker camping in the woods, but Haleth? Her approval is like winning the Nobel Prize in political violence, as far as ikka is concerned."

"Unfortunately, she has not yet approved of him," Haleth lets Elrond know. "Which, Celegorm, brings you to the second reason. Please say it slowly so I can savour it." 

"He's terrified of her," Celegorm whispers reverently. "It's simply beautiful to see. Every time she comes on a visit, I make it a point to come stay here to watch the divine comedy. Ha. You get that joke?”

“Celegorm, are you telling me the only person that Baba, the world’s greatest advocate for women’s empowerment, a man without a single chauvinist bone in his body…. sorry, that’s another Maedhros. I mean the man who once had a Kerala Times front page written up about him after he responded to an accusation of speaking over the female health minister with ‘I will stop man-talking only if she stops woman-doing’, is afraid of… is his younger brother’s wife?”

“That’s exactly why it was funny. Now, a few years ago these two were down here and your father made one of his poetic little threats to Caranthir, I don’t remember what exactly but something along the lines of eating his gall-bladder for breakfast if he doesn’t go draw water and heat it so that Sultan Maedhros, ruler of India, could bathe.”

“Caranthir had somewhere to be, so your Baba casually said oh, fine, then make your woman do it. And tell her to bring out a towel from the laundry room, and to get it ready in the next twenty minutes.”

“Ah, classic. A Baba special. But doesn’t he… do that all the time? He’s stayed here most nights for the last few weeks, and he’s given me a different idle threat every morning for the same reason. Baba has made someone or the other carry out that specific step of his routine ever since I can remember! And Fingon says he makes him do it at their place.”

Maedhros did indeed have an illustrious history of making other people draw his bathwater for him. In the 1960s and 70s, indoor plumbing had been an expensive endeavour in Kerala, especially when it came to installations in older houses, which were not necessarily built with such plumbing in mind. And as such, whilst the cliff-house boasted three indoor lavatories, they only contained the necessary plumbing provisions for toileting—bathing took place in an outhouse located in the courtyard at the back of the property. It was a small wooden structure fitted with guttering, to be used exclusively for bathing and, considering the house had exclusively been occupied by men since Nerdanel’s death, it had only been fitted with a door instead of a plastic curtain six or so years ago, when Fatima, Elros’ wife, had stayed with them briefly during her illness (much to the adult Elrond’s great relief, because he did not fancy explaining the doorlessness to Celebrían). 

This, of course, meant that bathing was somewhat of a process. First, one would need to go around the side of the house to the groundwater well, which was outfitted with a bucket-and-pulley system that required manoeuvring a hefty rope until the bucket hit the water, tilting the crank to fill the bucket, and then drawing the heavy bucket of water back up. It would take two-to-three buckets to fill a single metal tub, and a full-grown man would need three or so tubs. The water would then be lugged to the kitchen and heated on the wood-fire, before being deposited into a large bin in the outhouse with a selection of mugs hooked to the side. Since the age of twelve, someone other than himself had always performed this task for him, sometimes out of love, mostly under duress. 

He called it his singular non-Communist personality flaw. Maglor called it the most Communist Party of India (Marxist) thing about him, and Fingon said it was a symptom of the incurable disorder known as “being the eldest son of a large Indian family”. Still, the man’s bathwater was indeed drawn for him, day in and day out, a system as unchanging as the rising and setting of the sun. Quite literally, considering Maedhros worked a rather strenuous job (for lack of a better descriptor) and thus required the process to be repeated in the evenings when he returned as well. 

“Correct. But Haleth here, the wonderful woman…” Celegorm waves his hand in an auspicious circle around her. "Said something that not only had Maedhros apologising in an instant, but drawing his own bathwater that day."

"Oh, I almost forgot he did that, truly the mind blocks out joys as well as sorrows," Curufin sighs. "But yes, Elrond, you really missed out on the best moment of my life." 

“You know what a wonderful day that was for me? Watching ikka draw his own bathwater for the first time in his life?” Celegorm’s eyes gleam fondly. “Haleth stood there the whole time on guard duty to make sure he didn’t make someone else do it, or that Maglor didn't take pity on him and do it for him instead. It took him forty five minutes, I calculated, and he dropped the bucket into the well at least three times. It was like watching a tiger tapdancing. I even considered starting to celebrate my birthday on that day only.”

"Can one of you tell me what the hell it was she actually said?" 

Caranthir puts a loving arm around his wife. “Beloved, would you like to do the honours of telling our very own Elrond what it was you said to his father?” 

Haleth raises her eyebrows, but can’t help smiling. “It wasn't even that bad, he just didn't expect me to be the one who said it to him. He'd have put Caranthir-ikka in the wood-chipper had he tried. But fine. All right then… are you ready?”

Fingon, the twins, and the three middle brothers start synchronously drumming on the table in anticipation, and Maglor starts laughing. 

Haleth lets the drumming get faster and faster, and then gets up from her chair, throwing out her arms, Laurence Olivier at the breakfast table. “Who the hell do you think you are talking to, Shitmarket Stalin? If I ever hear you mention the word “bathwater” within twenty metres of me again, I'll shove both hammer and sickle up your ass and what I’ll do to you after that will land me in prison for a time that makes your terrorism charge look like after-class detention.”

Extract: Letter from Maedhros Feanorian to Arwen Undomiel, sent September 1975, translated from the Malayalam

You had told me, a few years ago, that your father and Elros had a little argument over my beating of a certain shopkeeper when the two of them were eight years old, but came to the conclusion that it was one of the indecipherable things about their father, one of the little mysteries they would never know. Of course, you being you had dismissed both of them as being beneath your intellectual level (damn right—that's my Arwen!) and wrote to me to ask me why directly. And I had told you I did not like people commenting on my face, and that I just lost it that day. And you had written back and asked me why I did not like people commenting on my face, and I replied saying that I would tell you when you were older, one of the very few times I made you wait for an answer. 

It took me this long to put together how to tell you such a thing, and why I would tell you when I have spoken of it to nobody but Fingon. I sometimes get a little confused on what to tell, and to whom. In a way, so many people have many parts of me, though I have grown more selfish across the years, and have begun to want them back. And I am afraid, the more I search for them, that all these people do not have these parts of me anymore. They are all scattered in the wind, and everyone is just pretending they alone understand the experiences of those in the generations that came before them. 

Such pretenses can drive people to extremes, turn pigs into prophets. After all, is that not what [REDACTED BY THE INDIAN POSTAL SERVICE] is doing? Is she not just pretending that she alone understands what her father, [REDACTED BY THE INDIAN POSTAL SERVICE], would have wanted for this country? And so, I will tell you the truth of it, and hope that it sits only lightly on your shoulders, and that you will channel it into some wonderful thing I know you will one day do. 

Now, I must clarify that my distaste for my own face has nothing at all to do with infidelity. My father and mother are the same father and mother of my brothers. Let me explain, however. My six brothers, and my father, were all considered very handsome. My mother less so, people said, though it was more that my mother has always defied the things people thought about her: in her way, she was as handsome as her father, in a world where 'handsomeness' in women was not tolerated. But yes, my father and brothers were all considered handsome in a conventional, Malayali sense: their complexions were said to be fair enough, 'wheatish', they were all tall enough and dark-eyed and solidly built. 

I was not like that, even when I was younger. I was called beautiful time and time again, by the best people and the worst, but not in the same way as my brothers. I am six foot, four inches: very tall for even European men, and very, very rare in India. I'm taller than your father, and he's considered tall for his people. My eyes are green, grey sometimes, another abnormality, and my face was very fair, originally I mean: if I stopped working in the sun as much as I do, I would be almost the same complexion as your father. My hair too, is lighter than most Indian men, especially South Indian men, and that is why henna-red took to it so easily. This was one of the reasons people in the public did not ask too many questions when they saw me with Elrond and Elros. If you close one eye and try very hard, you can almost believe we were related by blood. 

Such features are more common in the far North of India. Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, for instance. There's Afghani blood there, Pathans, who are tall and light-eyed have intermarried into many communities. In Kerala and Tamilnadu, aside from a few retained territories like Pondicherry, it's less common. Of course, there are families, usually old Christian families, who marry or have affairs with British men and women, or other Europeans, quite often the Portuguese, as in Goa. In those cases of course, it is understandable why the children look like that, and those families tend to be very irritating and overly proud of their 'lineage'.

My family is not like that. I am the only one who looks like this, and there is no 'lineage', prideful or otherwise, we have always been Muslim Mappilas, and there has been no intermarriage outside our religion until my brothers married Hindu women. I was very much an aberration. But such aberrations, though rare, have been heard to happen in North Kerala. They happen enough that we have names for people like me. Children being born looking like me, seemingly like magic, some people say. Fair skin, light eyes, tall, with lighter hair. There would be no pattern to it, no precursor, no religious category. Nobody else in the family would look like that. Green eyes, like a cat. 

When I was looking at those fairy stories to tell you in Malayalam, I saw a few stories about "changeling children". That is what it seemed like, you see, this strange phenomenon. But Westerners call it magic, fairy-story: for us, it's a bitter reality. But of course, the English language has a habit of defining the despair of others as magic, as irrational, as impossible.

For our words in Malayalam for children like this do not call fairies and spirits to mind. Different districts have different names for these children, and here in Kozhikode, they are called koodil-kootiya. Do you know what those words mean? It's not the only term. There are dozens, with dozens of ways to describe each one. But all these different terms for these children mean only one thing. That somewhere in their family tree, at some point in the last two hundred years, there was a servant girl who worked in a British sahib’s household. Do you understand, Arwen? A servant girl, in a British sahib’s household, who had no one to tell. 

Koodil-kootiya: mixed in the cage. 

You know the history of this country, Arwen. You know it as well as your father, and you deserve more credit than him because you wanted to know: you were not sent to school. You know the rot, the glut, the enormous muddle and the world's most populated cage, as ugly as it is remarkable. You know the incomparable complacency that existed in its cracks, and the vicious cruelties such complacency hid. 

You know this girl would have been an ayah, a nanny, most probably, or a wet-nurse for a recently delivered British baby. The sahib would have been frustrated at his wife, laid up after her long pregnancy, perhaps she has put on some weight. The ayah would be young, usually. Nineteen, twenty. They tend to be young, those who find themselves in such a situation, because older women tend to know how to get rid of the problem. What herbs to take, which doctors to go to. 

And older women would be less likely to mistake the way a British-sahib looks at them for love, having been looked at by them for decades. A nineteen year old? A nineteen year old sees love in every leaf, and the sahib would have known that of her! She would have been the single rose in a blighted garden, and he would have promised her an orchard. She would have been very scared, when she realised. She would have gone to him, and asked what she should do. And then she would have lost her job. 

When I was younger, your age even, I used to be delighted when people told me that I looked handsome. Who wouldn't? People would call me koodil-kootiya and I hadn't known the meaning of the words, because I had no time for euphemisms. When I found out, oh Arwen, I lost my mind. It was as though someone had cauterised my face, like every time I looked in the mirror I could see the cold shadow of history cast under my eyes. 

I was only twenty five, when I understood. How many things can I carry? I had to drop something. And so I forbid anyone from saying such things about me. My face disgusted me, and to live with such disgust I had to ensure that I never let anyone admire it in that way: not even my Fingon, even he knows to not use such words for me. That is why I beat that salesman. It had been only two weeks since I learned what my face held. I should not have. Of course I should not have: he did not know. But it was not because I was Elrond and Elros' father, and your father and uncle's father was a man who kicked people on the street. It was because I was the descendant of a servant girl in a British-sahib's household. 

And so, Arwen, all I think of when someone comments on my appearance is that servant girl. My family has always lived in Kozhikode, generation after generation. And so, I picture her here, in one of those big old villas near the shore. Can you? She’ll open enormous dusty-glass windows every morning. She’ll scrub the kitchen floor, set up a stew for lunch and then feed the master and madam’s children.

She would talk to them in Malayalam because it is something nobody can take from her, and such young children cannot help but learn, so it gives her the illusion of control. But it would not all be dull and dreary, there would still be little joys in her life. I like to think that. I like to think that when she opens the dusty-glass bay windows every morning, she’ll stand still for just a moment and take a long, deep breath, enjoying the sunlight streaming across her face, and smile. Is that not a nice thing to think?

I have never prayed in my life, and I never will. But I have asked question after question, demanded answer after answer from deity after deity. Ustad Bilbo (whom I know you love!) tells me I’m bound for hell purely due to my aggravating questioning being fit only for the devil. All this is perfectly true, and I will kick the devil's arse if I need to one day. Yes, yes, I have asked thousands of questions and demanded thousands of answers. 

But always, there has been one set of answers I have always demanded, day in and day out, the only constant since I was twenty five. And since you and I have become such good friends, Arwen, and as you turned seventeen, eighteen, soon, nineteen, I demand it even more. I threaten to box the Almighty's ears if he doesn't give me my answers, I grab him by the collar and shake him each day. Allah mian, tell me there was some joy in that child’s life. That she had known kindness, and that she hadn't been alone. Tell me she stood under the bay window each morning, and strained the sunrise through her smile. 

Chapter Text

Celebrían had been at the cliff-house for exactly twelve days, in which period she'd reunited with her husband, made fast friends with the unabashedly Francophilic Maglor, and as an effect of the latter, regained a musical nickname she'd not used since she was six years old (because Maglor was of the opinion that nobody should ever stop going by their childhood nickname, for instance his dear brother Mohammad Razul bin Faraz being known exclusively as Maedhros), hence she had been firmly rechristened as Cello by the clifftop residents. Still, it isn't until Elrond's two middle uncles stand in the courtyard mimicking a steam engine, that the photojournalist truly understands what exactly her husband had meant when he said “madhouse” and "when they're all back home together, nobody acts their age, though I couldn't begin to tell you what age anyone is acting and the best thing to do is not ask any questions." 

“I suppose we’ll have to wait till we get to the Party office to run through the postal strike strategy. I think ikka and Fingon were at theirs last night,” Celegorm tells Curufin, who had been sitting on the verandah showing Celebrían his terrible collection of blurry bird photographs that he planned to send to LIFE Magazine in the near future and demanding the photojournalist rate each one out of ten. “I didn’t hear the K-K Express last night, did you?”

“What on earth is the K-K Express?” asks Celebrían. “It sounds like a train. A seven out of ten for the crow… Curufin, why are they all just pictures of crows?”

“Madam, you live in Kakkanad next to that bloody banyan tree and try to find another bird, then you will understand my artistic struggle,” Curufin huffs, snatching the photo back. 

“Yes, the K-K Express is indeed a train—Kerala to Karnataka, high-speed line. Very energetic. Passionate, some might say.”

“Very good train. Built for the people by the people,” Curufin gathers up his photographs, nodding sagely. “You could even call it a Comrade.”

“Does it… pass by here?”

“In a sense,” Celegorm smirks. “In spirit, at least, if not in truth. A ghost train in the night. Rattling the windows as it goes. Have you read Edgar Allen Poe?”

“What does that even mean?”

“Cel, don’t ask—“ Elrond chokes. “It’s…”

“Celegorm, should we give a demo to our guest?” Curufin jumped up from the platform, grinning. “Come! Who should be the Fin-gine whistle?” 

It is in the middle of their passionate re-enactment, facing the same way, joined at the hip, thrusting like there’s no tomorrow and puffing away before the bright red Celebrían and cackling Elrond, that Maedhros himself appears in the doorway. And Fingon right behind him, both of them smiling quite pleasantly at the two full grown men pretending to be a steam train, Curufin demonstrating an engine whistle with two fingers in his mouth whilst Celegorm rammed into him ceaselessly. 

"Aha, the Express has arrived!" the latter cries out, the note of panicked hysteria in his voice muffled by Curufin’s shrill whistle, which in turn began to sound more like an ambulance siren. “See, Madame Cello, how punctual our KK Express is. That’s Communism for you!” 

“Salaam, Cello-sahiba and queenfucker. Celegorm and Curufin, my dear brothers. Remember which finger of yours I broke last time you made the K-K Express joke? Matching ones, wasn’t it? Remember what I said I’ll break if you made it again?” he puts an arm around each brother, sweetly steering them into the dining room. “Neck, was it not? Come, eat your fill. Will be your last meal—go for thirds if you want. Maglor, go and call Bilbo to perform last rites for your brothers.”

“You think Allah will take Celegorm?” Maglor calls out from the dining room, with absolutely no context. “Might need to go shop around for something else he can convert to. Give me a few days notice.” 

“Morning, Cello, and may I remind you of the time I said all three middle brothers suffer from congenital rabies? Same dog bit their mother thrice in three consequent years?” Fingon greets Celebrían, swiping Elrond’s newspaper. “This is the result. Second stage, that’s where they are. You might want to snap some photos of when Russo finally euthanises them… get a full set and sell it to a medical journal. Make us proud!” 

"Your father seems oddly, um, fine with the whole procedure, doesn't he?" Celebrían whispers to Elrond. "I thought he'd be a little more sensitive to that sort of thing, considering the kerfuffle last week, and, well, homophobia in general…" 

"Oh, he is extremely sensitive when it comes from outside the house," Elrond tells her, and cheerfully explains how, a few weeks ago, he had the pleasure of witnessing an adolescent boy on the street crack a joke about 'Mr. and Mrs. 377' as Maedhros and Fingon walked by, Section 377 being the statute of the Indian Penal Code criminalising homosexuality. Maedhros had grabbed the child by his ear, made him direct him straight to his father's house, whereupon he dragged said father out onto the street and thrashed him in front of his son for 'the public good', specifically for the crime of 'raising your son to become an asshole with legs'. 

"But he's all right with Celegorm and Curufin doing whatever that was?" 

"Put it this way," Elrond contextualises, gesturing at the house around him. "Those two have made that exact joke about every single couple, from their own parents to day-guests to, as I am sure happens behind our back, you and I. As far as Celegorm and Curufin are concerned, the K-K Express joke is the equivalent of legalising gay marriage. Everyone outside either tiptoes around the subject for fear of a thrashing or, well, turns it into the kerfuffle last week. He appreciates the sense of normality, see?" 

The 'kerfuffle last week' was Celebrían's grand introduction to Indian electoral politics, having woken at the crack of dawn to the sound of a policeman being thrown into a glass-fronted cutlery cabinet. The central police from Delhi had been raiding the homes of influential opposition leaders for weapons arsenals or plans for electoral disruption: Finarfin’s enormous white house had been hit the day before. Elrond had been half asleep, and hadn't understood why Maedhros reacted in such a way, especially considering he was accustomed to pre-election police questioning. He wasn’t afraid he would actually be arrested for the act: there was a reason his father wasn’t thrown behind bars during the Emergency like most other opposition leaders. Much like with Finarfin, putting a figure as directly controversial and personally violent as Maedhros in prison just before such a pivotal election would not just increase the likelihood of public unrest but guarantee a full scale riot, especially as Celebrimbor went around evoking Elros in every speech. And in the annals of Indian political violence, the act wasn’t severe enough, contextually speaking, to press charges after the election. 

It was more that losing control and antagonising a police officer over a routine raid seemed overkill at best and reckless at worst, even for Maedhros, who normally treated such procedures as a joke, enjoying the questioning thoroughly. But the reasoning behind his fury became extremely clear the moment they wrestled his father to the ground and cuffed him to a heavy teak table to question him about any rioting he may have planned. Half dressed he had been, clad only in a pair of loose pyjama bottoms and a dark, humiliated flush down to his chest, clashing awfully with his hair. And behind him, Fingon in a similar state of undress, face hard and eyes wet, the officers marching them both out roaring with laughter, third, fourth and fifth parties to the monumental joke that was Maedhros-and-Fingon, asleep in each other’s arms.

It was only after the officers threatened to question the rest of the household—which would involve waking the children, as Maglor was asleep upstairs with them—that Elrond swiftly remembered (understandably, he often forgot this specific piece of information due to Celegorm’s curated eccentricity) why the man was his father’s second-in-command when it came to Party strategising. Within two minutes, he’d rushed back into the house, shoved Caranthir and Haleth out of the back door and told them to make themselves scarce, and brought out not only Celebrían but also hers and Elrond’s British passports, demanding the officers put the them through to the consulate immediately, making multiple references to Cel’s employment with the BBC and Elwing’s former position in the Foreign Office. 

“Some bastards miss the taste of the boot like it's their mother’s milk,” he’d explained to Celebrían after the officers retreated, nursing only bruises and a fish-knife from the kitchen they took for posterity. “All you have to do is wave a scrap of passport leather and waft some shoe polish and you’ll get them suckling away at thin air.”

“Wouldn’t they go after him for, well, throwing that man down like that?” Cel had asked, as Maedhros, hastily dressed and still fuming, rushed past them and disappeared on his bike, needing to get to the Party office before the officers did. “Surely hitting a policeman is a crime… even Ereinion was dragged to court for a single slap, and he’s got privilege oozing from every pore.” 

“It is, but all the central forces can do with something like that is hand it off to the district police to pursue,” Fingon, having composed himself sufficiently, put his spectacles back on. He smiled wanly at her. “And as shit as the district police are, they’d just laugh, tell them they were asking for it and moreover, lucky to be alive. Every blasted cop around here would have known not to do something like that to Maedhros—charge into our room like that, let alone start cracking jokes, especially after what he’d done to Menon.”

What Maedhros had done to Constable Menon had been a splitsecond decision with far-reaching consequences, like most things in Maedhros’ life. Menon was a man who had devoted his existence, in both a personal and professional capacity, to proving that if the national population of cartoon villain sick fucks ever chose to unionise, he would have been a shoo-in for union president. He'd been so committed to the task that he’d started practicing early, the month before he had been due to take his police qualification exam, over a dozen years ago. 

That was when he’d been dining with his parents at Paragon, a small Malabari restaurant sheltered under the CH overbridge, and had spotted Maedhros and Fingon at another table. He had then spent the next half hour telling his parents about the rampant degeneracy of Kozhikodan society, and how “rescuing it from such moral degradation” had been his primary motivation to enter the police force. It had been a way to make his parents, who had even then been wary of their son’s cartoon villain sick fuck tendencies, believe that he was, in fact, motivated by a selflessness nobody around him understood. 

Maedhros, whom Menon hadn’t known personally but knew of, as did most people, pretended not to hear a word, not even turning his head in Menon’s direction. And watching a man rumoured to have the personality of a hyena and temper of a bear sitting quietly as Menon spoke, only further emboldened the almost-qualified officer, and his words grew more and more cruel and barbed. Maedhros and Fingon finished their meal, paid up, and Fingon left the restaurant, smiling politely, before leaning against an open window from outside, watching. 

And that was when Maedhros picked up his heavy chair, threw it point blank at Menon’s nose, and respectfully instructed the man’s parents to move aside as he delivered a beating so stylistically innovative that the restaurant proprietor started taking notes for the next time anyone tried to rob the place. He had then taken out two-rupees from his pocket and placed it in Menon’s own, telling him not to worry because once he qualified as an officer, he’d get even bigger bribes, perhaps even three rupees, if he tried his little heart out. The end result of all this had been Menon needing to postpone his qualification exam to the following year, as it was rather impossible to take a physical fitness test from a hospital bed with a tube up his arse. And consequently, the final, final result: Elros Tar-Minyatur, four and a half feet under Kasaba Station Compound. 

All in all, Celebrían had made a great impression on the cliff-house, most of them treating her like a better edition of Elrond, including Haleth, who had all but taken her under her wing and immediately told her every nasty little secret about not only the five brothers but half the town. The language barrier had also been dealt with: it didn't exist with Maglor, who wasted too much of his youth learning various European languages for some implacable reason and treated the Frenchwoman as his own personal thesaurus. 

The rest of them had been so impressed with her rather successful attempt to learn Malayalam to a passable standard across her marriage and “humiliated by” (in Caranthir’s words) Elrond not attempting to do the same with French, that they all made an effort to help her out, using English for particularly complex subjects and speaking slowly for her benefit. The recently re-established family patriarch of course, addressed her exclusively through an nearly unintelligible hybridisation of English and the Kozhikodan dialect of Malayalam just to make everyone’s lives more difficult, which according to Caranthir, was equivalent to crowning her a linguistic valedictorian as far as Maedhros went. 

Still, she couldn't help but notice that the man never met her eye, and never spoke with her when nobody else was around. He included her in his ribbing, absolutely, and was never actually anything but polite: still, Celebrían noticed an awkwardness that only seemed to exist around her, and a continued commitment to never being in a room with her alone. And yes. He refused to meet her eye. 

“Count your blessings, my dear Cello,” Haleth had told her, after she confided in the only other woman in the house. “Every time he speaks to me I wish he didn’t. Believe me, Maedhros doesn’t have anything interesting to say unless you want to know just how many people have been killed by black bears in Malappuram District, just how greatly he enjoys the idea of bears killing people, and just how much he wishes polar bears existed in India. Because last time I pretended to listen to him, that was what he went on about. For two whole hours." 

Celebrían asks Maglor about it when both of them are in the front yard, crawling around the kennel on their hands and knees and bushwhacking away at the floor. Celegorm, a couple days prior, had announced he would be bringing two of his dogs on an extended visit for both sentimental and security purposes. He’d picked out the two most vicious looking Dobermanns, because (as has been recently affirmed by the bear conversation) whilst Maedhros disapproved of the vast majority of animals, he had a teenage boy’s vicious appreciation of “pointy teeth and good killing rate”.

They're scraping decade-old mud off the tiles, and Maedhros had passed by on his way to the Party office—snorting away—khuda-haafez, shitscrapers, yet even then, not looking her in the eye. 

"You know, he reminds me of a painting that I'm certain I've seen somewhere," she tells Maglor, who had been busy cursing Celegorm's very existence as he tried to pry a solid chunk of moss out of a corner. "I just can't remember which one."

"Who, ikka?" Maglor tries to turn around in the confined space, laughing. "I'll tell you one thing. Don't tell him anything like that. He's not exactly the world's greatest appreciator of art, especially if you're talking about European paintings." 

Celebrían had swiftly grown to adore Maglor, not for his Francophilia but for how much he clearly enjoyed having her around: this, she thought on the first night after talking with him for three hours straight, this is a man who had been waiting years for me, for me specifically. And so, she tells him her concern. 

"Oh I don't even remember the painting," she shrugs, trying to keep her voice casual. "And it's not like he's ever actually looked me in the eye." 

“Eh? Now, listen, he’s just a little awkward around women,” Maglor waves his hand dismissively. “Didn’t grow up around them, really, other than our mother. He doesn’t say much to Deepika, Curufin’s wife… probably wouldn’t say much to Haleth either if he wasn’t so keen on getting her seal of approval on his big red Marxist arse. Although, I'm now curious as to what painting this is. I don't remember any of the great works resembling my dear brother." 

"Oh, I don't think it looked like him, just reminded me of him. But I can't remember, probably one of the reproductions my father bought and hung up. He's an artist, you know." 

"Truly?" Maglor turns around in full, smiling. He crouches down near her, putting the trowel down. "So was ours. Though sadly Maedhros, while very well read, isn't exactly the greatest appreciator of other art forms, much to my misfortune… although he did like the poem I wrote for Arwen." 

At some point in the life of every child born to the cliff-house, Maglor would compose a poem in the old Vadakkan Mappila-pattu style, sung poetry in the coastal dialect of the Muslims of North Kerala, and dedicate it to the child in question. He'd test it out, and then write it down in a little book he kept for that very purpose. And with Arwen, he had gone the extra step of recording his poem for her onto a cassette tape, and sent it to their house in Oxford.

Having actually met him in person now, Celebrían realises that extra step in the poem he wrote for a girl he had never seen outside a photograph is, in fact, the sum of Maglor. Someone who makes room within his own sorrow, takes advantage of the mutability of things like longing and grief and turns it into a balm, not only keeping that changed, new thing forever alive but sharing it far and wide. She has never met anyone so comfortable carrying a home around with him everywhere he went and offering it to anyone that passes by.

"It was so beautiful, that poem," she tells him now. "Even then, I couldn't understand some of the words, but I loved how they sounded. And of course, Arwen too, though she could read Malayalam very well by then… so we both made Elrond translate the whole thing for us."

“Oh, I am so glad you liked it. It was in the Islamic devotional style, see. I thought you might not… we’re not believers, but the words are beautiful, are they not? Still, I was afraid that… perhaps you might not like that kind of religious underpinning… and it is not very, hm, what is the word again? Not very feminist, perhaps. All that nonsense about the bangles.”

“Arwen was a professional feminist, probably would have qualified for the feminism world championship, and still she adored it too. It was beautiful,” she sighs, wiping down her hands. “Really, one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard, Maglor. I used to play it again and again, in… in the hospital.”

“No Maglor. I don’t know anyone named Maglor. It is Abba,” the man clicks his teeth, now trying to chip away grime from the kennel bars with a small hand pick. “I’m happy it brought you some joy, my daughter. I was a little worried it may not suit her, as I didn’t know her as well as I knew my sons, or these twins. So it’s wonderful to hear that she enjoyed it. And like I said, Maedhros ikka did too. It was his very favourite, and let me remind you for the third time, he isn’t a particularly musical fellow in any sense of the word. But he’d request it all the time, I remember.” 

“Ah, after her… after she died?” 

“No, no, before. Long before,” Maglor turns back around to her, smiling fondly. “He used to ask me to perform it quite often. First time I did so, it was to him and Elros, Arwen must have been… hm, eleven years? Maybe almost twelve. Just to test it out. Few weeks before I shipped you the record for her birthday.” 

“That has to be the best one you’ve done,” Elros had whistled through his fingers, clapping exuberantly. “You know what, I’m actually annoyed. It’s better than the ones you wrote for Elrond and I, and we were your sons. Quite rude, Abba, you’ve demoted us. Oh, she’ll love it, though I warn you, that girl really is a weird one, might transpose it into Mongolian throat-singing or something.” 

“I have indeed demoted you, and that, for the absence of doubt, is because I am certain that Arwen doesn’t snore until one in the afternoon on weekends and walk around the house in his boxers even after being explicitly told there will be guests over for lunch,” Maglor rolled his eyes, though smiling at the praise. “Besides, there were two of you. Half effort for each one. Ikka, what do you think?”

Maedhros, who had risen midway through the performance to go stand in the doorway and look out at the courtyard, joined his thumb and index fingers and stuck the other three up, in the universal sign for “brilliant”. This had been uncharacteristic to the point of concern, as Maedhros tended to be an insufferable backseat critic when it came to everything from the road-traffic laws of small Pacific islands to the neatness of Maglor’s music notations. 

It never mattered how little he knew about the topic at hand, he would stand over your shoulder and tell you how much better the job would be had he, Comrade Maedhros Fëanorian of Kozhikode, been the one to attempt it. He once rewrote three pages of Elrond’s mathematics homework, just because he didn’t like the way the boy wrote the number “2”. Utter silence was not an anomaly, it was a surefire sign the man had dropped dead where he stood. 

“Oh my god,” a slow, terrible grin spread across Elros’ face. “No fucking way. Baba, are you crying?”

“Shut the fuck up. Another word and I’ll drown you in the well like a rat in the monsoon.”

Looking as if his birthday, Christmas, and Eid had all arrived in a Maedhros-shaped package, Elros ducked under his father’s arm and stepped neatly out onto the porch. “Fuck me. You are. Ha! This is the best day of my life—Abba, come over here, you need to see this.“

“Elros, leave your poor father alone,” Maglor had scolded, though he couldn’t stop laughing, or tearing up himself. "Incorrigible!" 

“I didn’t…” Cel shakes her head, her own eyes filling. “Oh, Maglor.”

“Who is Maglor? Abba,” Maglor sighs in feigned exasperation. “Elros had a field day with it, you know… thought it was the funniest thing to ever happen in this house… cackled so hard that he started crying.”

“Oops, sorry Abba. And yes, of course Elros did,” says Celebrían, who had been good friends with her brother in law and knew most of his irritating qualities by heart, qualities she now understood were the result of spending too much time around Celegorm. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have let the poor man live it down.”

“Absolutely correct, well, at least until Maedhros actually dragged him over to the well and threatened to put him down it and close the lid,” Maglor joins in on her laughter, though his voice wavers slightly, even as he does an impression of Maedhros’ gruff voice. “You can marinate in there like a leg of mutton before Eid. I will then fast for thirty days, not wanting to drink you-flavoured water. Then on the thirty first day I will open it and eat you whole. But yes, for some reason the moment stayed with me. It was the first time, the only time I’d ever seen my brother shed tears of joy. I had thought his life too brittle to bear such a remarkable thing. Yet there he stood. I will never forget the look on his face, Cello my girl. I don’t know what it was about it that got to him, but whatever it was, it was wonderful to witness.”

Maglor parks his bicycle on a side-wall near Kasaba Station, and walks over curiously, because Celegorm had told him to stop by on his way to the shops if he wanted a nice surprise. He peers over the high garden wall and what he sees takes him by surprise. Maglor is not a man for the politics of gesture and wink-nudges, so he doesn’t know why on earth he’s grinning all of a sudden, ear-to-ear, when he sees what Celegorm had intended him to see. The entire bottom left corner of Kasaba Station compound, knee deep in flowers. A child he’s never seen zips past on a faster bicycle than his, stands up on his pedals and chucks a handful of tulasi branches across the wall. And then he disappears around the corner, leaving only dust and fresh-leaf smells behind him. 

He cranes his neck, looking over the wall again. Three feet high, a metric ton of enormous white wreaths in the corner, with ostentatious gold crosses and ST MARY'S JACOBITE SYRIAN CATHEDRAL, KOZHIKODE emblazoned across each one, delivered by a forklift driver that morning, courtesy of Daddy Finarfin's continuous commitment to never being outdone. And there's more, from others, from everyone. What looks like half an oleander farm, multiple bucketloads of hibiscus. Someone's marriage garland, and a carpet of marigolds. Maglor stares blankly at the petals-on-petals-on-petals, filled with a nameless sense of anticipation.

He assumes this has something to do with Elros, but is unsure as to what exactly, or how people now seem to know, or what the flowers actually have to do with anything. He wonders which Elros this is for. Comrade Tar-Minyatur on the murals? Arwen's brash, sporty uncle who taught her how to whack the other hockey girls' ankles with her stick? Elrond’s dead brother? The spectre in the second-floor room? 

Something hums and crackles in the air like electricity. A constant buzzing sound. Perhaps it is his Elros, then, Maglor's pompous boy who cared far too much about his hair and the precise angle of his beard. There had always been something churning in Maglor's Elros, thoughts and dreams and awful practical jokes that never actually went the way he planned. He plowed through the churn of his life, picking out bricks at random. He never could sit quietly, always fidgeting, always making some sort of noise. 

Maglor remembers a night, when the boys were five, when he woke to the sound of someone being kicked out of bed and went to the boys’ room to find both of them wailing. Elrond had kicked out at his brother, and then immediately began to cry for fear he’d actually hurt him, but Elros had deserved it, he said, because he’d been making airplane noises for hours and Elrond couldn’t sleep. And Elros had been crying because he was woken by being kicked out of bed, which was how Maglor learned that Elros was, in fact, capable of making airplane noises when he was fast asleep, so committed was he to screwing with his brother at all hours of the day. 

Maglor draws in a breath. The shadows are long and they stretch out before him, every treetop still and silent. His footsteps are uneven and mincing as he walks around the station, the air thick with syrupy sweetness and decay, liquidating under the setting sun. The hard-edged shadow of Kasaba, the secret mould clinging upside-down under its walls, and the flower carpet rotting in the garden, lying in wait. Something is coming, it promises. A sudden flit in the corner of his eye, a scampering thing clutching his old diary. He smiles, approaches a nearby plant and tosses a nonchalant handful of hibiscus over the wall. Then, he continues on his way. He doesn’t even have to look. After all, there is no one who knows Elros’ lopsided crescent grin better than his father, Maglor. 

He was my baby, he’d railed at his brother the night he returned from Kasaba. He was my baby and you ate him alive. And the eldest Fëanorian had stood there, taking it, face blank and mud drilled down into his nail beds, until Celegorm had to steer Maglor into his own room and stay with him all night, leaving Maedhros out on the porch with Fingon, who couldn't convince him to do much more than sit down. 

Elros had been asthmatic as a child, and it had been severe enough that by the time he was seven or eight, Maedhros and Maglor would learn to recognise the sounds of hoarse, croupy breathing, the guttural coughing, no matter how deeply asleep he was. They’d tried everything: ayurvedic medication, breathing exercises and—this one had been a Celegorm selection—making the boy swallow a small live murrel fish with various herb combinations smeared over it, three times a year, which had probably been Elros’ favourite curative. 

In the end, however, it had been Western medication they succumbed to: a set of old-fashioned epinephrine pump inhalers, which kept his lungs in line as long as he remembered to take them any time he exerted himself, or felt an attack coming on. Maglor had sewn a large pocket into all his shirts, with a button to close it at the top. It had been why Maedhros never pushed him to partake in the physically taxing aspects of Party-leadership, instead instructing him in the arts of sharpening his words into weaponry, pressing his own aggression into his son's honeyed sentences. 

It was under control, the asthma, as long as he kept his inhalers on him. Still, Maglor and Maedhros never forgot the harsh sawing coming from his little throat, never once failed to wake at sounds even resembling it, even when it had just been the street dogs outside, growling at each other. He and his brother had always known how exactly their son had died. Uruttal was an interrogation tactic developed by the Kerala Police, one which fit neatly into the definition of “torture” in every language, involving the compression of the torso and lower limbs under a large lock, or urali. Menon had only meant to maim, not kill: the killing was a blessing he hadn’t expected or truly recognised, a killing that, if one was to speak strictly in the language of courtrooms, could be said to have nothing directly to do with the police interrogation, and was simply a childhood illness manifesting itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And still, an environment in which cruelty did not just flourish but was nourished, was an environment ripe for the over-stepping. 

That was what Celegorm had realised almost instantly, when Ustad Bilbo phoned him up some weeks prior, the night Maedhros had confided in him, to tell them that something had to be done. There had been no need, he realised, aside from sheer brutality, to make Maedhros go to four stations and get on his knees at each one. There had been no need at all to have made him scrabble in the dirt at Kasaba, let alone rest his head on Menon’s boots. And yet, as Celegorm told Finrod on the way to the charcha, discussion, as the Ustad called it (Bilbo greatly enjoyed being the one to organise it), that was exactly how they overstepped, how they put all their weight on a rotten plank. For had they admitted to Elros’ death-in-custody, it would have caused the exact same grief for his family, it would be just as politically motivated and clearly a barb aimed towards Maedhros, because Elros had been the furthest thing from a particularly hardline Communist, let alone a Naxalite. And in Indira Gandhi's India, they would have gotten away with it just as easily. 

The meeting was technically organised by Bilbo, because 'Daddy' Finarfin, the unfortunately popular leader of the main opposition party in Kozhikode, Kerala Congress, point-blank refused to turn up to any meeting that Celegorm orchestrated, due to the way in which most events Celegorm orchestrated tended to devolve into obstacle courses of public violence in which Finarfin's men found themselves coincidentally disadvantaged. Hence Bilbo had offered to arrange a room in the masjid, a place of worship in which even Celegorm wouldn't start a riot. 

Daddy had, just to make a point, half-heartedly complained about the venue being religiously biased, asking "why not the Church?" Bilbo had to remind him then, that inviting “born-again blasphemers” like the three Fëanorian middle-brothers into any place of worship was, in fact, a sacrifice rather than a blessing, and Finarfin—having suffered through his firstborn’s youthful friendship with the three—had to agree. The meeting had thus been agreed and the brothers, obviously excluding Maedhros and Maglor, had been contacted, the council having been the actual reason for their spontaneous return to the cliff-house. 

“Every one of us has known that boy,” Celegorm had said to the loosely assembled circle of vaguely influential local politicians, slipping and calling Elros a boy because he had been one once, and Celegorm had known him then, as did the rest. “Knew he had asthma, that it could get bad if he didn’t have his inhaler on him, didn’t he?”

“Some of us more than others,” Daddy Finarfin snorted. “Remember, Finrod, how I had to rush him to Baby in the Jeep?” 

Baby, let it be clarified, was not Daddy’s secret third child, as one might justifiably assume, and nor was it a person at all. Baby was Baby Memorial Hospital, or the little clinic it had been back in the early sixties before establishing itself as a hospital. 

The incident referred to involved Elros, early on in his political career, deciding to give a speech standing in a dust-cloud for reasons Daddy Finarfin defined as “Communist posturing”, and launching into a tremendous asthma attack the minute he stepped down from the podium, groping around for the inhalers he had forgotten. 

Maedhros hadn’t been around that afternoon, so Daddy had hoisted the six-foot Elros over his shoulder, chucked him onto his Jeep—between a large crucifix and a larger poster-board of Finarfin’s own face, an experience Elros later described as a “Biblical acid trip” and rushed him to the hospital, Finrod next to him playing the national anthem very loudly from the Jeep’s outside-speakers to serve as a makeshift siren. It had, ultimately, saved his life. As a token of his gratefulness, Maedhros had allowed Finarfin to thrash him soundly the next time they clashed on the street, sacrificing a canine to the beating. He then made Elros pay to get said tooth crowned and capped in solid silver, because “people who make speeches in dust clouds forgetting their lung capacity is smaller than that of the average mouse, clearly have more money than sense”. 

“I get your point though,” Finrod nodded at Celegorm. “Under this regime, it would have been remarkably easy to get away with it: beatings at the station are frankly, codified into law. A man prone to asthma attacks, who is known to have the condition, expiring like that during questioning… it would have been piss-easy to wave away. Yet they didn’t choose that option, they chose pointless brutality for some reason… It baffles me.”

 “It doesn’t baffle me. What they did is not pointless brutality, Finrod,” Haleth said tersely. “The brutality is the point."

“I must say, I am inclined to agree with Haleth-ji here,” Daddy Finarfin said, causing both Haleth and Finrod to look at him like he’d just grown a third head. “Stop looking at me like that, did I say I was going to marry her?”

“I’d like to see you try,” Haleth snorted. “But I’m glad you agree. With the enormity of what ended up happening, I think a lot of us here forget the actual motive behind the brutality, why it had been Elros chosen for an interrogation about Naxal terrorism, and not Maedhros himself, who has an actual terrorism charge in his name. It is because Maedhros has the terror charge that Elros was the one questioned. Do you understand me now?" 

Caranthir nodded. "India has no life in prison sentence, no sentence goes over twenty years, due to the cost of housing criminals. And so, criminals deemed 'incorrigible' are given the death penalty. Which is rare, but with a terror charge and then, say, perhaps a violent act against a police officer, or in a police station… from a man notorious for having no self control whatsoever. What do you think Maedhros would have done?"

Nobody replied, though they all knew the answer. 

Finarfin cleared his throat. "I don't know what he'd have done. But had it been my children… and they know this. Had it been my children, I'd have killed the cunt. And no offense to you Commies, but your man is a fucking maniac. If I'd have killed Menon, Maedhros wouldn't blink an eye before setting his family's entire estate on fire."

"Exactly, Jesus Christ here has nailed it to the cross," Celegorm grinned, blowing a mock kiss as Finrod mouthed "jihadi bastard" across to him, sticking up a finger. 

“The boy’s death was clearly an accident, the intention had never been outright murder—Menon is too much of a chickenshit to kill anyone in cold blood or even come close, no matter how much he disliked the man,” Daddy Finarfin continued, as the resident expert in people who disliked Maedhros. “He subjected him to uruttal as part of the interrogation because he couldn’t do it to Maedhros and get away unscathed, and because he wanted Maedhros to lose his shit. He fucked with Elros because Elros was not a fighter: he’d have struggled, certainly, but he’s not a gold-star number-one cunt like Maedhros. But in their pursuit of brutality, Menon and his dogs made some crucial omissions. Correct, Haleth-ji?”

Haleth nodded. “First omission was the selection of Elros itself. The Comrade is his father—it would have been the worst blow for him to see Elros in that state. So Elros was dragged in for some bloody road law infraction, instead of going after any of Maedhros’ brothers, and then questioned about his Naxalite sympathies. Omission number two is right there.”

“I d—d—don’t understand,” Celebrimbor cried out at last, his voice strangled. “They got away with—got away. What’s the use of t-t-talking about the mistakes the—mistakes that have been made? It has been five years. What are you p—planning? You think you’re goi—going to march to Kasaba and ask them to dig up the garden? Entire district p—p—police are involved, four stations directly. None of them will lift a finger to touch that station, because they are all c—c—complicit. So what is the use of discussing wh—what they did wrong, five years later, just because we know where he is now?” 

“Because lots of little omissions, when they come together, make a large hole—their exit route, covered up by soil until now,” Curufin mimed a massive circle, and then brought his palms together in an advance apology to Ustad Bilbo for what he was about to say next. “Menon’s slipup last month, the final omission, means the last hole has opened up, joining with all the others to create one massive asshole. So that is where we are now. We are balls deep in the asshole of atrocity. Perfect place to go drilling and digging around. Understand? Omission number three and four, they made ikka turn up by himself, then traverse multiple stations. Celegorm, how many was it? Five?” 

Celegorm looked sick to the stomach, but nodded. “Five, yes,” he said shortly. “Four stations, but five rounds if that makes sense. Kasaba to start with, as it had been Menon who dragged him in. That’s where he directly asked whether they’d done something to him, and Menon asked him to go search the outside gutters if he wanted to know. And that he did, and searched the grounds also. Nothing, obviously.”

“Ratfaced shitcunt,” Finarfin muttered, wincing as Bilbo glared at him from his corner, not too happy to forgive him as easily as he forgave Curufin. “Which stations were they?”

“Kasaba first. Then Marad," Celegorm counted off on his fingers. "Nadakkavu Station. Vellayil. Then finally Kasaba again. All this on foot, mind you. And considering the state he must have been in… around three-four hours, I'd say. Because when he returned, he… fuck. Give me a second." 

Celegorm sat down, clearing his throat. Finrod placed a bracing hand on his back, for which he received a swift, grateful smile. "Sorry. Right. Three to four hours, see. When he got back to Kasaba, Menon put him through another charade, then told him to clear off. And he didn't… he didn't check the grounds again, but he circled the building trying to look at the cell window. Nothing, of course, but… the urali was leaning on the wall. And, well. It was obvious, wasn't it? Boy couldn't breathe on a dusty fucking day, let alone… sorry. I can't continue." 

"You don't have to," Haleth said gently, and rose in his stead. And led by her, the charcha drew out the omissions.

First: the selection of Elros, Comrade Tar-Minyatur as the victim of choice, simply because him being the beaten party would infuriate Maedhros the most, and accusing him of Naxalite terrorism, because it was one of the crimes severe enough, even on paper, to permit such a brutal interrogation. 

The choice, however, would not make sense to anyone who took a second or third look—the Delhi-educated Elros had always been regarded as a moderate compared to his father, and was not involved in Party violence for the most part, aside from street scuffles here and there. The charge he was pulled in for, speeding and reckless driving during a car-chase, had in fact taken place far from the boundaries of Kozhikode itself. 

In addition, though Caranthir had not joined up with the forest unit full-time until after Elros’ murder, both he and Haleth had been openly associated with the Naxals for years at that point, and would have made far more sense as targets—that is, unless one was afraid of retaliatory attacks from said actual Naxalites. 

Second: choosing the interrogation tactic of 'uruttal' due to its maximum cruelty. In selecting Elros, they had forgotten he was known to be asthmatic, having in that moment only seen him as Maedhros’ upstart son. As such, this omission had inadvertently ensured there would be an unplanned murder in Kasaba Station that evening—and their response to this would lead to the next set of omissions. 

For even at this point, it was still possible to walk back from the scene, call the state police constable general in Cochin and admit to the death-in-custody. The paperwork, on which it was recorded that Elros, though pulled in on a driving charge, was interrogated for suspected Naxalite terrorism, in combination with the man’s hospital record, would mean that Kasaba station wouldn’t receive much more than a slap on the wrist for medical negligence. However, the officers had chosen to further their brutality, because at that place and in that time, they could. 

Third: they made Maedhros come alone and in-person to Kasaba to find his son, in the hopes that he would crack and try to go for them, fulfilling their initial aim. Of course, learning your son was almost certainly dead is very different from learning he was beaten and interrogated, and so Maedhros had not cracked on the spot, he’d shattered into a fugue state which he didn't snap out of for days. And once he’d gotten home, Fingon had ensured he didn’t step out of the house until he came back to himself.

Fourth: they made him return to Kasaba at the end of the night, because it wasn't enough to pull the wings off an insect, they wanted to see it writhe around. And because of this, when Vellayil Station called Menon to report that Maedhros had arrived there, he'd told them to send him back across to Kasaba. As such, it meant two things. First, that Maedhros was able to spot that uruttal had taken place in the station that evening and, knowing his son's medical condition, had it confirmed beyond doubt that Elros had passed, meaning he didn't continuously strive to make Menon admit it, leading to him to drop his guard five years later and make an off-hand comment. Second, that the officers at Kasaba Station only had a short time in which to dispose of the body, and had thus chosen to bury him in the courtyard.

Fifth: not letting Maedhros take home the body in question. This one was, as Haleth said, closest to Finrod's comment on "pointless brutality". There simply had been no explanation to this particular choice, because it was the most unnecessary decision in what was already a drastic sequence of unnecessary decisions. The most cruel act in the bunch, the biggest omission: their desire to deny a father the right to bury his son leading to the existence of a body buried in a place only the police would have access to. 

And there, wide open, lay the asshole of atrocity. "Fucking them with flowers", as Caranthir termed it, would be the first step of three. 

__________

“I can look through it if I want, can I?” asks Maedhros. "So generous you are to me, Elrond." 

It's past midnight, and he had just returned to the cliff-house from a late-running campaign round, and he'd sat on the platform toeing off his shoes right next to Elrond, who had been writing in his notebook. And Maedhros had spotted a few new books on his pile, grabbed the first one and threatened to read it aloud, only for Elrond to roll his eyes and tell him it was not a diary and in fact was one of the albums of Arwen's baby photos Maglor had asked Celebrían to bring over, and that he could, as repeated above, look through it if he wanted. 

“Yes, yes, you can—we've got a few more upstairs, I've been looking at them for hours so you can…” Elrond gestures, and then stops writing abruptly at the look on his father’s face. “Are you all right?” 

“Have I wronged you?” Maedhros asks coldly. 

“What?”

“I’m asking you a question. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Have I wronged you?” he rises from his spot on the platform, looking directly at Elrond. He has forgotten—across the decades—what his father looks like when he is truly furious, and the reminder is stark. His face is stiff, cadaverous, like Maedhros Fëanorian has crawled out of his own body but nobody has yet come in to replace him. It sends a cold shiver down Elrond’s spine. “When you grew up, I mean. Was I a bad father, hm? Have I ever laid a hand on you? Have I ever raised my voice to you when you were children?" 

"What?" Elrond frowns. "No, you didn't. What are you talking about?" 

Maedhros nods, jaw tightening further. "I tried, did I not? With you, I mean. With both of you. I was eighteen, boy. Eighteen. Every day, I tried my best even though I was not made to raise children. Correct? Will you admit that, at least? That I have tried?"

He doesn't wait for an answer. "So, what have I done wrong? Of all the things I don’t understand, Elrond, this right here is the topper: what colossal wrong have I done to you? Where in our past have I brutalised you so much for you to have the nerve to look your father in the eye and insult him so shamelessly?”

“No, no, you know you haven’t—you know you weren’t a bad father,” Elrond stammers out. “What’s gotten into you? I wasn’t asking you to analyse… you were good. Both of you. You know you were, if it's about me not returning, I… you know I’ve missed y—“

“No, I don’t know that,” the photo album is shaking in Maedhros’ hand, and he throws it back on the platform, where it sits, half open and facing down. “And this has nothing to do with your return. All I know, Elrond, is that you did not let me see that child. The first grandchild of this house, because both my parents died before they could even think of grandchildren, that girl—you kept her away. Not once, Elrond. Not even once.”

“What are you talking about? Why are you bringing it up like… what, you think I should have—“

"Look at photographs if I want? When you've had fifteen years? What is your damned photograph going to do, eh?" 

"You could have tried, couldn't you? You called what, twice, thrice a year?" Elrond snaps, snatching the album back up and closing it. "How was I to know you were sitting here wanting to see my child? You spoke to her, what, ten minutes a few times a year? Maglor had asked to see her at least, every year, and I know you—" 

“Did I SAY I was finished?” Maedhros roars, slapping a hand onto the platform and causing an old teacup to fall off the edge.  “Don’t interrupt me! You’ve clearly forgotten your family but I am your fucking father. Who the hell do you think you are, cutting me off like that? How dare you interrupt me!”

“You can’t frighten me with this shit, Baba, I’m not six and afraid of people shouting. I don’t know what it is you are taking out on me, and I don’t give a—“ 

“You think I’m taking something out on you, is it?” 

Elrond, just as pale in his anger, takes a reflexive step back, which Maedhros doesn’t miss. He starts laughing, eyes wide. “The hell are you walking away from me for? Think I’ll hit you? Have I ever fucking hit you?" 

“I don’t know what you'll do!" 

“DO YOU THINK I’M A FUCKING ANIMAL? Is that why you kept your daughter away? Is that why your wife looks at me like I'm… fuck! What is it? Is that it? Both of you think I’d have clawed your child to death, is it?” Maedhros steps backwards, away from him, but it feels like he’s moved forwards, looming menacingly. “IS THAT IT? You’re afraid I’d have—“

“I don’t know what you’re bloody on about!” Elrond reflexively switches to English, and Maedhros actually snarls, turning into the animal he’d threatened to become. 

“YOU WILL NOT SPEAK THAT LANGUAGE TO MY FACE UNDER MY FUCKING ROOF—YOU UNGRA—“

“For fuck’s sake,” Fingon barks out, slamming the front door open and looking just as tense as the two of them. “Maedhros, it’s past midnight, shut it, you’ll wake the children — look, the neighbours are turning the lights on. Go inside. Elrond, whatever it is, drop it. I don’t care. Drop it now.” 

The same shapes, thinks Elrond. Always, the same shapes we make. 

“What, I’m to take his shite lying down, am I?” Elrond snaps, English again. His father’s face twists in equally unbidden disgust—and hurt. 

“Fingon, stop interfering,” Maedhros turns to his partner, as if searching for any excuse to look away from Elrond. “This is my house. I’ll raise my voice where I want.“

“Those children are six,” Fingon hisses. “I don’t give a damn where you want to raise your voice, or why. You’ll scare them. Get inside. Or get in the car and we'll go to mine for the night. But keep your mouth shut.”

It is only when he hears Maedhros storm inside, wrenching open an inside door and kicking it shut so hard the house itself seems to rattle, that Elrond moves to Fingon, who is kneeling on the floor quietly, picking up large clay shards from the broken cup. "Fingon, don't you get tired of cleaning up his mess?" 

“Can you please stop talking about your father like he’s a dog?” Fingon says politely, his jaw clenched. “We don’t use such language in this house.” 

"You're excusing his actions then, are you?" 

Fingon stands back up, tossing the shards out into the corner of the front yard. He looks exhausted. "When have I ever excused his actions, Elrond? Or his words? All I'm asking is that you don't talk about him like he's a dog. Not in this house. Enough people do it elsewhere, and I do not want to hear it here." 

"I just don't think there's much use in tone-policing if we're both on the same page," Elrond says tightly. "I don't understand why he gets like this. Over nothing. He started an argument over not seeing my daughter." 

Fingon shakes his head, closing his eyes. "I'm not getting involved. And I'm not denying that he's too quick to anger, I agree that he shouldn't have dialled it up like that. Elrond, you were what, seventeen? Eighteen? When you left here, that is. He's not going to act the same way he did to you when you were a child. This is what he does with his brothers, with most people."

“What, and you think that’s all right then, to speak to people like that? Over my daughter, Fingon. My daughter is dead. No decent person would ever…"

"Did I say it's all right?" Fingon crosses his arms, frowning over his spectacles. "Did I say you should forgive him? He's never been a decent person, Elrond. You never knew him when he still could-have-been a decent person, because you hadn't even been born then. But this is the father you have. I'm sorry for whatever he may have said, but he truly did wish for you to have brought Arwen here. They both did."

"Fingon, please," Elrond's voice breaks, and he lowers it. "Arwen grew up chewing on every damn silver spoon she could reach. She was an activist, yes, and she was smart, and we raised her well, I know we did, so she wasn't spoiled, at least, not in the way many with her background are. But that girl went to a fee-paying private school from the moment we adopted her. Every want of hers, we didn't just meet but doubled, she was popular at school, good at sports, she was on track to saving the damn world, she was so good. She's not known… She's never heard a raised voice inside her house, let alone…" 

Elrond gestures desperately at the shards of the teacup in the yard. 

"So he was right? You both kept her away on purpose? From him? Oh, Elrond. Don't tell me that," Fingon's face crumples. "And I beg you, don't tell him that." 

"Not… it wasn't a conscious choice. It just happened. And no, Cel has no involvement, she doesn't even know about… any of this. I would have brought her, I would… later… but… why does any of that even matter? You're acting like that justifies his reaction," Elrond gathers up his books, once again blinded by anger, though there is an undercurrent of guilt to it now, at the sight of Fingon's devastated face. “You think it's normal to lose it at me like that just because I'm not a child? Because that's what I'm getting from you here. I don’t know what battered wife syndrome you have going on, Fingon, but—“

“Battered? Wife?” Fingon does not raise his voice, is as soft-spoken as always, though he looks angrier than Elrond has ever seen him and somehow this cold fury is frightening in a way Maedhros’ explosive rage never has been. “Are those the words you have gifted your father and I, hm? Perhaps he's right. Perhaps you've learned a few too many new words.”

Elrond sighs explosively. He sits back down, rubs his temples. "Shit. I didn't mean it like that. Fingon, I'm sorry." 

When he looks back up, Fingon has gone back inside, though he doesn't slam the door. Elrond sits in the dark for a while, eyes closed. His father's closed off, furious face, Fingon's cold defensiveness. Or perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps he's embodying Gil-galad on his first visit to New Delhi, horrified by the traffic and struck by the idea that life in what he'd considered the historical parts of the planet would have dared to move on from the splendid, static images in his mind. He wonders when he started to analyse his own conceptions of the cliff-house, and tries not to think of it as a form of cannibalism, for such trains of thought would almost inevitably end in him calling his publisher and begging them to pull Sea Stories from shelves. He opens the swollen front door as quietly as he can, and knocks on the door of his room. 

“What was all the commotion?” Celebrían asks, moving backwards to let him in. “I heard shouting, crashing—did someone unsavoury turn up at the house or something?”

She looks pale and rather frightened, and her paleness and fear drag away whatever guilt he'd been nursing, and lets anger rise back up. Elrond finds himself grateful for it. 

“No, it was my beloved father,” he snaps, shrugging off his light sweater. “The side of him you haven’t yet seen, that is. Well, here’s your chance. The Comrade, and all his vicious incarnations.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she places her hands on his waist, embraces him from behind, and draws him to the bed. “Did you argue?”

He sighs as he sits, leaning back into her and letting her brush his hair from his temples. “No, we didn’t. At least, not exactly. He’s just in one of his moods. Gets like this sometimes, these bloody rages... And Fingon more concerned with how I address him than… fuck.”

“What was it about?” she asks apprehensively. “Would I… would I set him off?”

“Oh, Cel, no,” Elrond turns to look at her, taking her face in his hands. “No, never. He’s never actually raised his voice to women or children—not as far as I’ve known him. He would never, not to you. But he doesn’t control himself around… around anyone, really—I don’t think he even can.”

“I had one of the photo albums near me,” he continues, shaking his head. “Photos of Arwen, I mean. I told him he could have a look at it if he wanted. Started ranting and raving, apparently I insulted him somehow with the offer, but of course, he just bit off my head when I even tried to ask how and why. He’s always been like this. Not to us children, never, I admit that… and not to Fingon—but with his brothers, his Party colleagues, fucking everyone else.”

"I see." 

She doesn't say much else, for fear she'll end up saying too much. Elrond falls asleep quickly, head on her shoulder and arms around her, keeping her pressed tight to him. Anger exhausts him as easily as grief does, and she lies awake staring at the ceiling as knowing gnaws at her. The letters. She and Elwing had found them months ago, three drawers full to the brim. Little presents too. And Arwen had never told them—Arwen, who told her mother everything. Arwen, who marched right up to her on her first day of Reception and pointed at another boy, right there in the playground, and said 'mummy, that boy smells like cheese but I want to marry him'. Celebrían had to give the cheese-boy's glaring mother an apologetic smile, wrench back her own hysterical laughter, and let Arwen know that she did not need to tell her every thought she had. Arwen shook her head, said "yes, I do" and that had been that. She'd told her mother everything, and her grandfather more. 

She couldn't bring herself to read more than a couple of the letters, but she could not forget three drawers full of them. How that man had loved her. 

Celebrían is not a stupid woman. Arwen would not have gone into that building, had she never written to her grandfather, the terrorist. She would have been asleep in bed, feather-pillows and incense and she would have had a fan blowing right in her face because she liked noisy things like that. She would not have gone into that building to do god-knows-what to that statue. This is what she tells herself most nights, to help her sleep. It is the reason she does not tell Elrond about the three drawers of letters, because Elrond too would tell himself that because if he doesn't…. 

But Celebrían is not a stupid woman. Because whilst Arwen hero-worshipped her grandfather in secret, her own father, her uncle, her grandmother, her father’s best friend, her boyfriend, and to an extent her mother—had all been nudging her slowly upwards, trying to fit her into hero-shaped holes for the sake of their own redemption. None of them, including Arwen, had thought about what those words would sound like coming from that mouth. That Arwen on a podium is a markedly different image than Elwing in her office, Elrond in a book, Gil-galad in his lecture theatre or even Aragorn in a byline: she was louder and darker, and so, she was more dangerous.  

They hadn't realised that bigotry was not an event but an atmosphere. It had been an administrative, procedural tightening that left no bruises. It did not disrupt nations as much as it defined them, accruing like humidity on the walls until the very act of breathing made you complicit. Britain, curling into a ball after it all, a kicked dog eating its own organs, showboating its lack of penance. Celebrían's little girl never stood a chance. She was only nineteen years old. Perhaps you might have known better at nineteen. But Arwen did not. 

She sees a dull light from the window, and pads over, reflexively smoothing Elrond's hair away from his face. He's fast asleep, he's always been a heavy sleeper, having spent much of his childhood sharing a bed with a brother who pinched or chatted him awake on the nights he didn't wheeze him awake. He looks very different here. Celebrían doesn't have the energy to define how, lest she start wishing for such things herself. At the window, she looks down and spots Maedhros, his unmistakable height. He’s never met her eyes, not once. She searches for the painting again, as she’s done for the past fortnight, and still cannot find it. And then she turns to the trunk it had taken both Celegorm and Fingon to lift out of the car and grabs a cloth bag she'd buried near the bottom, taking it outside with her. 

Maedhros is on the porch, leaning against a pillar and looking out into the dark, a vigilante with nothing to watch out for. He looks like a captain on the bridge of a ship, she thinks, on a nauseatingly calm day, hoping for a squall on the horizon. 

“Does no one else know?” she asks quietly, and he jumps.  

“Hm?” Maedhros shifts awkwardly to almost face her, moving a step away for propriety as she walks towards him. “It’s dark. Not good to stand out alone. For women, I mean.” 

“Well, you’re here too, I’m sure it’s fine. No, I saw you out here, and I was wondering…"

"What am I doing?" he sighs. "Pretending I haven't given up smoking." 

"I know the feeling," she laughs, though he doesn't. Hesitantly, she continues. "Am I right? Does no one else know?” 

“Know what?” 

Celebrían takes in a deep breath, hands shaking slightly. She times her exhale, and then looks up at him, only to see him avert his eyes from hers again. “Ente… kochu viplava kaari. Your little revolutionary.” 

Maedhros turns to face her, blanching. “You know?” he croaks. “You know about the letters?”

“I found them… in her drawers. The letters." 

"I see." 

"Does no one else know? Not even Fingon?” she asks again, and he shakes his head almost imperceptibly. My god, she thinks. 

"Does Elrond know?" Maedhros whispers, and when she shakes her own head, a tremor of relief runs through him. Celebrían tries to meet his eye again but when he looks away, she reaches into her bag, holds out a book to him. 

"I think this is yours." 

He gives her a swift smile as he takes the book from her: The Legend of Khasak. She'd thought he'd be angry at her, for knowing: it had been why she hadn't spoken to him about knowing. Well, that, and the knowledge that Elrond would have probably lost his mind. But he smiles at her, and stands there looking at the book and then up at her, like something arrested in the middle of sinking into the ground. She knows the stance well: caught halfway into the ground, feeling all the joy you have ever known running over your shoulders, dripping across your back and slipping away from you. 

“I sent it for her to read last year,” he says quietly. “Like… a challenge. The language is quite hard, in Malayalam, I mean. It uses difficult forms, confusing grammar.” 

She nods. "Did you think she was… I'm not too good at reading Malayalam myself, at least, nothing more than the newspaper. Did you think she was ready for such a difficult book?" 

"I did, yes, and look — I can see she was reading it. She'd always leave… these small pencil notes when she finishes each chapter. See these numbers? Six out of ten, ten out of ten. She was giving marks, see, how difficult she finds each chapter," he flips through it slowly. Celebrían leans over to look. She had never noted that little habit. 

It truly brings home to Celebrían just how much of her daughter Maedhros had known. It had been easier to think of him as having loved the idea of Arwen, like Elrond had loved the idea of India: a granddaughter, the first girl-child, a static formulation, symbolic of whatever hopes and dreams the perceiver carried. Everyone had loved the idea of Arwen. Who wouldn’t? That had been the reason she couldn’t bring herself to truly read the decade’s worth of correspondence between grandfather and granddaughter. For the letters would have unwound the unbearable truth and laid it bare before her like rings circling the cross-section of a lightning-struck tree-stump: that Maedhros Fëanorian had not only witnessed the remarkable evolution of Arwen Undomiel’s heart, mind, thoughts and ideals, but had guided them along on their way to wonder. 

“Here. You take this…” he says thickly. He holds out a piece of card to her, clearing his throat and turning his face away from her. “A bookmark? I think that's it. She left it inside. She did not… ah. She could not finish, it seems.”

Celebrían turns to look and feels a familiar sting in her eyes, though she smiles through it. She sits on the platform beside him, leans in to look at the bookmark and stifles a wet laugh. It is filmy and dark, with a hand-drawn cartoon paperclip scowling out at the world. I’M NOT DONE YET, it says in bright metallic marker, because all their lives are a fucking joke. 

“Elrond used to get on her for dog-earing books… folding down the corners, I mean,” Cel explains. “When she was twelve or thirteen, oh, he caught her at it one too many times and set her a ‘punishment’, to make herself a series of bookmarks.”

Maedhros nods intently, focusing tightly on her as if she’d been commentating on an Olympic sport instead of sharing stories of her daughter’s rather irritating adolescence. “Then?” he asks eagerly. 

“Well, then she made these. Just to piss him off more," she points at the bookmark. “Hold it up to a light and you’ll see why.”

He holds the card up to the moon and laughs silently, because the filmy bookmark is in fact a strip of film, a negative, and in it lives a series of Arwens: curly hair down to her shoulders, a finger crooked into her lip, pulling it aside to show… he squints, and makes it out—a dark hole where a tooth should have been. He forgets, momentarily, how to breathe. 

“Knocked out in some match… hockey, lacrosse, something like that. She was very sporty,” Celebrían explains. “Like her uncle. When he’d visit, the two of them would go out and play cricket, football, hockey, whatever, for hours on end. She was captain of most of the sports teams she joined, and Elros—for cricket in the summer and football in the winter—he’d always go along to her matches. Elrond used to say he was welcome to it, that he’d take the two-month respite from standing ankle deep in mud. But yes, she was very good.”

“Is it?” Maedhros stares at the photograph, wide-eyed, and then brings his hand back down into the darkness. “I knew she was good, the way she spoke about it. I did not know she made captain. And yes, Elros was very good also. Did OK at school, but in sports, he was the topper. But… why is she using this as a bookmark?"

"To piss her father off," Cel laughs again, and wipes her eyes. "Elrond is a terrible photographer." 

"I'm aware," Maedhros snorts dryly. "I made the mistake of asking him to take some shots for the Party." 

"Yes, well, somehow he's worse when wanton violence isn't the subject. She was a little bit of a vain-pot, see, and would get so irritated at him for what she termed bad photos… almost lost her mind when she saw the one he'd picked out for Sea Stories. So, she just… started doing this. Cutting out bits from his rolls of film, drawing on them, and using them as bookmarks." 

Maedhros nods intently, as if she'd told him something profound. He opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it. Holds the bookmark up to the moonlight again, little-girl backwards, pulling her lip wide open. All the wrong colours. Then, he hands it back to Celebrían.

"Keep it," she tells him, and folds his fingers around it. He recoils slightly at the overfamiliar touch, but doesn't move his hand away. In the dimness, shadowed by their linked hands, the film turns dark again and Arwen stays in shadow, silent and unmoving. Perhaps he could spend a few hours, on a day he needs it, inventing the day the photo had been taken. Elrond's awful, wavering camera-hands, turning all backgrounds blurry and blue, Arwen's mouth open, midway through an irritated remark, dark brows contorted and arching over the tooth-gap. He aches to know. 

“It must have been very lonely,” says Celebrían. “Knowing her so silently.” 

“Is that why you look at me in such a way?” he asks in turn, the words stumbling over each other in his haste to not answer her question. “Because you knew about the letters?”

“How do you mean? Like I blame you? No. No, I don’t. Truly, I don’t. Everyone had a part to play, and yours was no bigger than mine.”

“No, not like blame.”

“Pity?”

“No.”

The man in the painting, she thinks again, vaguely. She tries again. "I don't… I don't blame you. I never did. I… I blamed Elrond, yes, at first… but we've spoken. And… Elros too perhaps, a little. And myself, of course, and Elwing and Gil-galad and oh, so many people. But not you in particular, not before the letters and not after. I promise.” 

“No, it is not blame.”

“Then?”

“Fear,” he averts his eyes again. “You are little afraid of me. Are you not?”

"I… no," she frowns. "No, of course not. Perhaps, well. I was a little apprehensive, after earlier… the argument with Elrond. But not before, not normally. I thought you were being odd. I thought you didn't like me. You never met my eye. I was never afraid of you. I'm not." 

"I did, at first," he seems surprised at her accusation. "Look you in the eye, I mean. Then, I saw you feared me—and I did not wish to frighten you. And just now, when you said you had seen the letters, I thought it was because of that. Or perhaps because Elrond had said before to you… about the way I…"

"He hasn't," she says honestly. “He’s never said anything like that. Only just now, earlier, I mean. That’s why I was apprehensive—afraid, a little, yes. But not before, not at all. There is nothing to be afraid of. Is there?”

He shrugs. “Is there?”

She looks at him, this sprawling landscape of a man. Unstable in his construction, hollows under his eyes but the eyes themselves bright and green and heavy, the feeling that something was going to fall any time now. Celebrían wonders how it must have felt, to have gotten the news from across the world, and know second-hand, that your grandchild was dead. She and Elrond had collapsed into bed together, the second night, soaking holes into each other’s shoulders. Her breath catches—she hadn’t meant to walk back across sorrowful shores again, and she’s still pulling herself out of the sand when she turns back to him, and feels it again. 

The man in the painting. Celebrían breathes in sharply, and flushes. Oh god. The man in the painting. 

“You reminded me of a painting,” she blurts out, even though Maglor had told her not to say such things, because she doesn’t want to lie. And she doesn’t want to say nothing, and let him go on thinking she truly is afraid of him. “I had thought… you reminded me of a face I’d seen in a painting, one my parents had up in their house. I don’t know why. You don’t look like it, no. But I was afraid of it, when I was younger. I just realised that. I was afraid of the painting I thought you looked like.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, stricken. “I didn’t mean to. I… I didn’t realise. I’m not afraid of you. It was… it wasn’t you. My father. My father was an artist. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to. My father was an artist.”

“Mine was also,” he gives her a quick, reassuring smile. “I am happy to know that,” he says. “That you are not afraid of me. But… What is this painting?”

She flushes a deeper red, but plows on. “Um. He spent some time in Algeria. His parents were stationed there, when he was younger.”

Maedhros raises an eyebrow. 

Celebrían had never thought of the painting before: at least, not consciously. Defense de Mazagran, one of the acclaimed battle paintings by Henri Felix Philippoteaux, a condensed, suffocating scrap of borrowed rage. It showed a battle at Mazagran, when the Berber and Arabs native to the region had tried to reclaim the town: much like with the statue of General Buller, it had been a mediocre creation about a set of mediocre soldiers, the French forces having nearly lost. In the painting, however, they were soundly victorious, standing atop the crushed crowd of indistinguishable foreigners. 

The bustle of bearded men with long, curved swords, their lined and desperate eyes that followed her across the corridor leading to her bedroom. The contextual note under the painting had described in sparse detail the conquest of ‘Algiers’ by the French, and went on to describe the smells and sounds: blood and smoke, cries of jihad, ya Allah — I struggle, o Lord!

It's odd, the way inanimate things dwell in the mind like buildings in a sunken city. She wouldn't have remembered the painting if anyone had actually asked her about it, wouldn't have considered it, had she not been distracted and thinking of Arwen when she caught Maedhros' desperate eyes from the corner of her own. And there it is, Defense de Mazagran. The blue-coated soldiers lining the top of the pyramid, righteousness waving like a flag in the breeze, a quiet, soothing pleasure in the midline to draw the gaze. And yes, beneath them, the writhing mass of hot flesh, and a dark-eyed man in the middle with his sword raised high, his terrified and furious eyes turned to the sky, jihad, ya Allah, al-jihad!

She had been afraid of it, when she was much younger: of the chaos and hatred in the eyes of those corralled and controlled. And then her father had moved the painting to his study because Celebrían was afraid, and because her mother had called it barbaric, and then she had forgotten it entirely because she was a child. She doesn’t know why it surfaces now—perhaps the reappearance of Cello, her childhood nickname, caused it to float belly up. Or perhaps it has always lived inside her, sneaking through her blood, unrecognisable, until it bubbles back up across her face every time she meets her father-in-law’s eyes. 

It isn’t that Celebrían is racist, or even ignorant: the point is that she isn’t. The point is that clinging to skulls and flowing unseen through veins had always been what such paintings did best. Paintings and statues and storybooks, outgrown truths, the shucked-off skins of Empire. Her father had loved the docile brushstrokes of the painting, the sheer detail and emotion rendered in every face, like he could stand in the corridor of their house in Normandy and look at it and feel the trembling desert under his feet. And little Celebrían, who would one day become a photojournalist, would pass it every day in her pyjamas, and it would scream from the corner of her eye. It had been like pressing a seashell to your ear in a landlocked country, that rush of fierce and formless violence from a long-receded shore, stirring up the valiant and subduing the meek. She had always understood why Arwen had wanted to topple the statues in Oxford. Now she understands why Elros had wanted to do the same in Devon. 

Maedhros presses his lips together as she explains, and they’re almost white when she finishes, tacking on another apology. She looks up at him, winces, and finds that he’s looking at her, as intense as ever. 

“Woman,” he says, mouth trembling and twitching, sahiba gone with the wind. “You are sitting here looking me in the eye, telling me you aren’t afraid of me, but—but you—“

He drags in a breath with seemingly enormous effort, shaking his head. Exhales. Celebrían feels herself trembling, but sits on her hands so he can’t see them shivering. “But that you confused me with some goddamn jihadi from—Allah, mian—some French goatfucker’s shitty painting of some dusty battle in… where? Algeria? Oh—and—you… are daring to say it to my face?”

And then he gives such a cackle that both Dobermanns shoot up in the kennel, standing at attention. Maedhros doubles over on himself, tears running down his face, shaking uncontrollably. He turns back to her, pressing his hand across his mouth to muffle the sound, choking: “are you a real person? Allah, this is… now it makes sense. Now, Arwen makes sense. Basket case like you bringing her up one side, depressed fucker like Elrond other side. Now I understand how that girl was so crazy.” 

“It isn’t even funny,” though Celebrían can’t help laughing too, despite herself. “You’re such an asshole. I was baring my heart open to you, or whatever that saying is!”

“And now she is calling me an asshole under my own roof,” he wipes at his face, and then salutes her. “That nuthouse you were locked up in, you buy me one ticket also. Whatever they put in the water there, I need a few buckets.” 

“Absolutely,” Celebrían nods, breathless with mirth and relief and it is somehow refreshing, after Elrond’s tearful apologies and her parents’ hush-hush don’t-mention-it about the sectioning and the hospitals and the therapists, to hear a certified nutter outright call it a nuthouse. “Right after you take me to stand in a circle with all your friends at the mosque and we can all hold hands and grab swords and beat ourselves bloody together like very normal people.” 

“Did you wrestle my son into the marriage hall?” Maedhros looks at her, blinking in awe. “You have horns under your big hair or what? Magic spell? How does he stand listening to you?” 

“Oh, we aren’t married…” she shrugs. “I mean, legally, we are but…”

“You did not have a nikkah?”

“Is that the Islamic ceremony? No… Elrond wanted to, and neither of us wanted a church do, but the maulvi he tried contacting said he couldn’t do it because Elrond wasn’t actually Muslim. Technically. So we just… didn’t have a ceremony. He was also a bit mopey about not having the both of you there either, though of course, Elros flew back over for the courtroom registration.”

“Apologies, I was in prison, next time I will make sure my trial and sentencing is scheduled at less inconvenient time for you both. Not my fault he went and got married two seconds after he graduated. And what, your technical maulvi passed with honours at Islam College in Oxford? Who said you can’t get married?” Maedhros looks horrified, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re telling me you and Elrond are living in sin? In the house my father built? Straight to hell they will send me for this.” 

“Aren’t you living in sin?”

"Am I?" Maedhros, with the air of a child about to show off his favourite toy, reaches down the neck of his shirt, pulls out a thin chain looped around a thick gold ring with Quranic verses carved into it. He smirks at the look on her face, and gives her the finger. 

“You’re fucking joking,” she breathes out. “You can’t even do that in England. Is that real? How on earth…?”

“Perfectly real, you go check with Finnu, he has one also, but a plain one… bastard refuses to convert on paper even. But fully real. I was twenty, so boys would have been, hm, four or five? They were there also. Signed and stamped. Azchavattom District Masjid. Certification also I have… of course, nikkah certificates are not legally valid unless the imam applies for state certification these days, and the Kerala State Islamic board would probably go nail the priest to the wall like a towel hook for actually conducting said marriage, but it’s absolutely real,” he tucks the necklace back into his shirt collar. “I told you, no sin for me. You’re both the only sinful ones in the house. And probably Curufin, because he’s almost definitely giving it to the Finance Minister in secret.” 

Maedhros enjoys how impressed Celebrían looks at the fact he is (theologically speaking) actually married. And so he decides not to tell her the means through which he acquired his valid-under-the-eyes-of-god marriage certificate, a sequence of malevolent events which involved him carrying Bilbo Baggins to the edge of a tall building and threatening to kick him off it “like a football” if he didn’t conduct his and Fingon’s secret wedding ceremony in the back room of the masjid, because “my father can excuse terrorism, Ustad-ji, but he will draw the line at premarital fucking, so we have to get a move on before he quite literally rises from the ashes”. 

(Maedhros was allowed to make such jokes, having watched it happen.) 

He turns to her, feeling the armchair critic in him make a glorious return. “Have I ever shown you the best photo I took in my life?”

Celebrían blinks at the sudden segue. “No, you spent the last two weeks looking anywhere other than at my face, remember?”

“That’s your fault or mine? Yours. Now listen: it was in Vatakara, bit north of here, there was a bear. Number one best animal in the world. And it was sitting on top of a coconut tree—have you ever seen that in any Western magazine?” 

“Erm. No.”

“You won’t. Only in our Kerala do bears climb coconut trees. Right on top it was sitting—would put all your portfolios to shame, that picture I took right that second, with one hand only, mind you. Remind me tomorrow, I’ll get it out and show you.”

“I’m shaking in anticipation.” 

The leaves shift like restless children and Maedhros and Celebrían sit silently, with no need for further conversation. A thousand things are wedged between them, sheltered by the burnt facade of a building he has never seen and she will never stop seeing. Arwen’s lopsided laugh and the countless dead, the hatred on the faces of pencil pushers and civil servants, conflicts and miseries and inflexibly inhuman atrocities. Like Defense de Mazagran, the heaving pile under the neat, straight line. 

It wouldn’t fix things immediately. A painting so deeply and carefully rendered cannot truly ever be unpainted, let alone in a night. It’s impossible to pick out a single name, face or date. Like places, some people are worn thin by their own stories. They become too fragile for time to tread upon, so the past no longer passes but accumulates like carpets of flowers in autumn, clinging like quicksand to anyone unlucky enough to walk the same path. Still. Here they sit, Maedhros and Celebrían, at ease under the stars. There are two large, sprawling burns under her left sleeve, and forty six raised scars on his back. Her hair had gone from dirty blonde to snow white in four months, and his had gone from murky brown to steel-grey at seventeen. Maedhros holds the bookmark up against the moon again, because this Arwen is invisible in the absence of light. 

Were you afraid? he asks silently. That night, in the dark. Were you afraid, Arwen? 

What the world-gobblers never seem to understand, Celebrían supposes—with a kind of weary mental sneer at the state of things—is that the desire for companionship cannot be made to leave with the advent of cruelty. That there are lightning-struck trees, which even when charred to a husk, still turn reflexively toward warmth. She watches Maedhros hold the blue-black negative up to the light again, trying his very best to smile back at the girl in the dotted frame. Neither will ever know Arwen the way the other does. 

Defense de Mazagran by Henri Felix Philippoteaux

Chapter Text

Every insurrection is kindled by private grievance, dressed in doctrine and remembered in the language of redemption. The revolutionary Fëanorians had never been a united collective, at least not for most of their lives. Instead, they were frantic shrapnel from whichever vital part of Fëanor had been demolished by the day his ceremonial swords were thrown into the salt pond. They ricocheted in various directions: some ignited, some burned to dust, a couple fizzled out. They shared no common ideology but were all unsettled by order and estranged from stasis, all carrying a pathological compulsion to excoriate, to pick at corrosion, be it within themselves or out in the world. 

To them, disruption was the only true way of survival, writhing and thrashing their only means of locomotion. Like Maglor and Elrond who repeatedly consumed and regurgitated parts of themselves into lyric and prose, Nerdanel who swallowed herself whole to make a point which never hit its mark, Celebrimbor and Celegorm who focused their energies on perfecting parochial politics, giving no thought to what such obsessions did to their own psyches. Maedhros the firstborn, the relic who had all his best ideas whilst beating himself bloody in the masjid. Elros Tar-Minyatur, who could not change the world and Arwen Undómiel, who did not outlive them all. The historians, who would one day reduce and redeem them, would note how despite the Fëanorians’ failure as individual revolutionaries, they had, in a way, made a collective success out of symbolic failure.

The sky slides back and forth between red and grey, settling into a faded orange. Fish slam across the sides of the boat, and Maedhros knows that if he touches one it’ll be as warm as a bronze doorknob in the sun. He wishes he hadn’t tried to read Elrond’s bloody book and its insufferable ways of describing things, calling riptides eddies as if the boy hadn’t grown up with his feet shoved firmly in the wet sand of the Arabi-kadal, the Arabian Sea, hadn’t spent three full years between the ages of four and seven utterly terrified of the magical migratory piranhas Maedhros convinced him roamed Kerala’s coastline after six in the evening, which had—incidentally, been the exact time Maglor wanted the boys home for dinner. 

“Arwen, I tell you,” he declares, crossing one leg over the other and stretching them out, making the boat rock slightly. “Those Sea Stories. If I was the one who wrote them, that book would have been the number one bestseller in the world. Fish story? Talking fish? I’d have written talking fish twenty times as good. You agree, no?” 

“Hmm,” Arwen raises her eyebrows. “Achacha, remember the last conversation we had about fish? You know what would happen if you were to publish that in England? Or, you know, anywhere.” 

Maedhros grimaces sheepishly. “Was it the woman-fish…” he catches sight of her expression. “Ah, I see. It was the woman-fish. I was hoping you’d have forgotten that one.” 

“No, I don’t think it’s possible to forget your grandfather’s letter happily declaring that fish were, in fact, the women of meat,” Arwen lets him know, tying her hair back and wiping her brow with a sports wristband she always had on. “Just because he personally doesn’t like fish. And then acting like I was accusing you of oppressing the poor pescatarian proletariat in your response, rather than telling you that you were being a sexist bellend.”

“I was not saying it because I want to speak against women,” Maedhros tries to clarify, a finger in the air as though he’s giving a speech. “I was saying it because chicken and fish and all are simply a little bit less substantial when compared to mutton and beef. You want me to tell you the nutritional composition of mutton, then you compare it to fish? I have it memorised. Ready?”

“Well, I’m a woman! So am I a fish?”

“Hm,” Maedhros sits back, considers the question seriously. “You are mutton in the shape of a fish. The one and only Arwen Undomiel, the first Muttonfish to exist. Happy?” 

“Can’t I be a goat made of fish?”

“Who the hell wants to eat that much bloody fish?” Maedhros clicks his teeth, grimacing. “No, no. Fish made of mutton. Kerala coastline delicacy.”

They’re on a two-person boat in the middle of the Arabian Sea, a thoughtfully reckless choice to row out so far for no reason whatsoever. It’s the Arabian Sea because that is the only sea Maedhros has ever set eyes on, and he has no desire to look upon any other. Even in dreams, he cannot traverse lands and waters he does not know: dreams are a grid upon which one can build the most wonderful and terrible structures, yet the foundation is always something that the surface-you, the awake-you, can understand to be true. The Arabian Sea is possible—and so upon it, he can build Arwen in a boat, and she too is possible. 

Maedhros, much like Elrond, is unfortunately (in literary terms at least) from Kerala. Water has forever been the state’s tired, tried-and-tested all-purpose tool. In cinema and books and poetry, songs across centuries from Vadakkan paatu to film-tunes, the rise and fall of the sea and all its naughty children had become a recognisable switch, a familiar sting on the buttock, a whip for self-flagellation and a side-mouthed behave yourselves or else. Mess up and the sea would take you, or send its little friends, the rivers, to do its dirty work. Everything set in Kerala with even the skeleton of an emotional narrative will have a drowning, either a dramatic one in some sunset-stained sea or a quiet little pond-feeding in someone’s back garden, or anything in between. No wonder Elrond is writing a book about bloody rivers, he snorts dryly even in the dream, no wonder he called his magical storybook Sea Stories. Literary histories like his, he’d have written about the closest puddle. 

“Can you tell me about the river?” Arwen asks topically. “Ada’s river, I mean. The one near your house, the one that died. Did it dry up?”

“He remembers that?” Maedhros laughs. “Of all things, he remembers that? Even I don’t remember it very clearly. He’d have probably told you in more detail than I can, Arwen. It was a very long time ago.” 

“He never said much,” she sighs. “Only that he thinks of it all the time. That you told him that no river was infinite. They are only as enduring as our care, you said. Only as alive as our love. And that you were upset by the loss.”

“I did say that. And yes, I was upset.”

“Because the river died?”

He shakes his head. 

Elrond had only been ten years old when the two of them had come across the river during a morning walk, and saw that it lay dead, strangled by silt-waste slurry thickened by strings and shreds of fabric from the new garment factory that had just begun to operate. A thin trickle of orange dye run-off sluggishly running through the dirt. It was 1945—the war had ended and preparations had begun for the transfer of power, marking the beginning of the British state’s promised departure from India. Viceroy Mountbatten would be arriving soon, and in the North, blood had already begun to spill. The garment factory had been one of many popping up across the soon-to-be-nation in preparation for self-sufficiency, the bolstering of home industries. Maedhros had looked at the river, his son right beside him.

It lay dead, flat and orange-grey and diminished, slicks of foam clinging to the banks. The trees on either side seemed to lean away from the dye run-off. And Maedhros had stared at it and felt not sorrow but a cold premonition. The snicksnick of ribbon-cutting and factory-opening, the construction of new statues to replace the broken scarecrows. And the scattering of people.

Across the backwaters and temple tanks, along the railway lines and shuttered depots, men and women disappearing into creases of the land, neither fleeing nor returning, but doing something stranger: withholding themselves. They take no songs, no slogans — only ration cards, voter slips, certificates promising this and that. They leave quietly past quieter mosques, drag their heels beside a deader river, and disappear without a sound. The tree cover thins and time curdles. The betrayal comes dressed in khadi cotton, bundle upon bundle of homespun atrocity waving subsidised flags. Redistribution turns into reconciliation, and textbooks outlive memory. Maedhros stands there saying his own name again and again, his true name, the one his father gave him, Mohammad Razul bin Faraz, over and over again, quieter and quieter with each repetition until he’s making no sound at all, though his mouth keeps moving and the name rattles around his head. 

This is my land. This is my land, and I want it and I want it and I have tried so hard to get it. This is my land and I want it, but it no longer wants me. I was once its witness, its shield and sword, its barefoot messenger. Am I now the debris beneath the oath? How many flags have I planted and how many roofs have I climbed? This is my land, which I love, which recoils from me. Which flinches from my touch like a house that has already chosen its ghosts.

Maedhros had dragged himself out of the vision and sat down right there on the bank, buried his head in his arms, and cried. He’d forgotten that Elrond had even been there until he felt the boy’s skinny arms around him, felt his tentative gestures of comfort, he hadn’t realised that it would become one of the most formative memories Elrond had of this country and his life here. That Elrond, being only ten, had thought his father was weeping for the past and not the future, and had let that image—The Terrible Before—dictate the course of his life.

“Not because the river died, Arwen,” he tells her, squeezing her icy hand and trying to fix his old mistakes. “Because it was killed. I was upset because it had been suffocated in silence, and I realised I would spend the rest of my life digging in search of its corpse. And I was afraid—I was terrified.”

“That the river would turn into something monstrous?” 

“No, not that. I was afraid that I would dig and dig and one day I would hit bedrock and find out there was no corpse at all. That the river had never existed, not in the way I remember it. Not in the shape I longed for it to take. That I would stand before its grave and realise it had never truly been mine, that I had thrown all my decades away searching for somebody else’s idea of a river.”

“Oh, achacha,” she presses his hand back, even tighter. “And now? Do you think the same now? Has it not been worth it?” 

“If I answer that, I’ll probably catch a sedition case in addition to my terror charge,” Maedhros says wryly. He laughs then, leaning back and closing his eyes against the sun. “Put it this way, my Arwen. There has been joy, love, companionship in my life—I do not deny it. Wonderful aberrations clustered around me, my Finnu, my brothers, my boys, you, my little grandsons. But such things do not take away from the fact of the matter. That your grandfather has wasted his life.”

The sun draws itself up and away, though the faded orange remains, the sky remembering something it was told to forget. The boat swivels lazily on the still, open sea. There is nowhere else to go. 

“Ikka,” a male voice calls out. “Talwar!”

Brother, take the sword!

Maedhros opens his eyes. The chanting has changed to drums. The mosque crouches over him, his fellow flagellants taking up new positions.

“Sorry, brother,” he smiles apologetically, throws the barbed chain he’d been using on his back off to the side of the hall and shakes the sweat from his hair. He takes the shortsword from the man, casts a swift eye upwards to ensure the privacy curtain is in place and that he can’t watch himself being watched. He takes a deep breath, iron tinged as it tends to be in this room. 

In tatbir, you cannot let a wound seal closed: you strike and strike again, hit the bullseye of memory over and over. Maedhros would rather despair than dull. He strikes, the duffu rhythm guiding his hand all the way to the ritual. Baba. Amrod. Amras. Amme. Elros. Arwen. Oh, Arwen. 

And then he returns to the sea. 

Cel has been smoking on the porch and Elrond realises he’s almost used to it again. Or more that it’s slower to mess with him these days, that he’s gone from choking at the very sight of far-off ashtrays to going through almost a full campaign round with his chainsmoker of a father that first day to now, sitting and writing in the clouds his wife left behind and only feeling a mild thrum of anxiety in his throat. 

Maedhros had come up to him that just last week, having stood in the doorway watching her smoke like a starving dog tied outside a feasting hall. He’d marched over to Elrond (who was standing at a safe distance yet not terribly far away) with half-crazed, hungry eyes and said “are you cured yet? Elrond, you tell me the minute you can deal with cigarette smoke? Understand? Completely cured. I will wait. But if you don’t tell me by the day of the election. Then that’s it. I’ll kill you and eat you in one, understand?” 

“You know, I feel like traumatic stress reactions tend to not perform well under pressure, Baba, you can’t just give me a deadline. They should start employing you as a nurse in hospitals. Fantastic bedside manner you have.” 

“Perform under pressure? I’m talking about your nausea, not your pecker. Did I ask you about your performance? This he is saying under my father’s roof, see, such vulgar items,” he addresses the last sentence to Celebrian in English, having decided to ‘surprise’ her with English every so often just to relish in watching her attempt to decipher the unpredictable shifts from an almost-unintelligibly dialect-heavy version of her fifth language to a heavily-accented and grammatically-uneasy version of her second language. “He is letting you smoke? And not his own father? Ungrateful bastard.” 

“Oh, he’s not letting me smoke,” Cel had said, holding up her slim cigarette to show Maedhros. “I’m smoking despite him, because my favourite father-in-law has introduced me to… Maglor, what were these called again?” 

“Churuttu,” Maglor explained, rolling up another. He grinned at his envious brother, looking supremely pleased with himself. 

Churuttu referred to home-rolled cigarettes, straight tobacco rolled up in thendu-leaves, which the very-French Celebrian had immediately taken to, primarily due to said cigarettes being both aesthetically pleasing and completely unfiltered. Maglor, after hearing that she’d been a smoker in England and didn’t know what brands to get in Kerala, had gleefully introduced her to the vice of hand-rolled churuttu, having dedicated too many years of his life to mastering, cherishing and greatly enjoying the art of rolling them to perfection, even though he couldn’t smoke them himself due to their harshness and adverse impact on his singing voice. 

He’d consoled himself for the last few decades rolling them in batches for Maedhros, who would go through twenty or so a day, often chaining them in the double during election season. And yet just last month, that creature comfort had been yanked from under his feet by his older brother’s selfless split-second decision to (temporarily) quit, leading to a cold-turkey abolition of what Maglor called his “deeply fulfilling act of service”, and everyone else referred to as “morally ambiguous knitting”. 

“You too have betrayed me, sitarfucker,” Maedhros pointed at Maglor before turning back to Elrond, suddenly drawing his surprised son close to his chest and kissing him firmly on both his cheeks and his forehead. “I will be killing and eating you very soon if these two keep this up. Just letting you know now itself, how much I will miss my boy.” 

Maedhros had always been like that. Not to his children, at least, not when they were children, but Elrond had seen the same stories play out between Maedhros and Maglor, Maedhros and his other brothers, with everyone else. The sudden rages, the almost-wordless apologies. The day after they’d gone for each other’s throats, Maedhros had dragged him from the breakfast table, brought him along on his rounds, made him sit there while he slashed the tyres of Celeborn’s Jeep for daring to try and stick a Kerala Congress campaign poster near a postal union member’s house, and then offered him a swift I wish I hadn’t gotten so angry with you last night and Elrond had accepted it because, like Fingon said, this is the father he has. And he was the same with his brothers too: just a few days ago on his way to bed, he’d shoved into Celegorm’s hands a packet of photographs he’d paid someone to take, a series of interior shots from one of the nearby temples, muttering a nearly inaudible sorry, brother. Celegorm had stared at the envelope, open-mouthed in wonder, and then up at his brother—who had, by then, fled to his study.

And yet at the same time, Fingon had stayed cool with him, almost icy at times, for the entire week since their argument. Elrond hadn’t understood what exactly it had been, how exactly he’d offended Fingon when it had been Maedhros to whom he’d said his most hurtful words. Still, that’s why he’s on the verandah watching Fingon scowl over a corner from which he’d just cleared the mold from last week, that had mysteriously grown a third second skin across the past few days. Elrond breathes deeply, hoping that the other man has actually been standoffish with him and that this isn’t another embarrassing case of his own inability to decipher between external change and self-delusion.

“Fingon?” 

“What, Elrond?” 

Ah. Not a delusion, then. The thought comforts him, oddly enough. 

“I wanted to apologise,” he says directly, walking over to the platform Fingon was sitting on, and leaning against a pillar. “For what I said to you last week. I was awfully rude, and… I shouldn’t have taken my anger at Baba out on you. I’m very sorry.” 

Fingon stands, turns to properly face Elrond, and offers him a tired half-smile. “Thank you for saying sorry. Accepted. All is fine between us. I know you didn’t intend to hurt me. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you why I was so angered by your words to me. I’d been trying all week, just… I didn’t know how to phrase it. At least, not without going into things that might feel irrelevant.”

“That’s fine,” Elrond winks. “I’m not exactly gainfully employed at the moment, I have time. If you’re happy to tell me, that is. Because I was rather confused too, though that isn’t your fault either.”

Fingon nods thoughtfully and takes a long breath. He lets it stagger out, then clears his throat. 

 “Ok. I think I have it. Just… listen to me, all right? Even if it doesn’t sound relevant. If you did not know your father and came across him for the first time, would you be able to tell that he’s homosexual?” he uses the English word, and then smiles at Elrond’s confusion. “You can answer honestly. Don’t worry about causing offence.”

“No,” Elrond admits awkwardly. “No, I wouldn’t be able to tell.”

“Do you think anyone would?” 

“I… I know there’s no way to tell, uncle, if that’s…”

“That doesn’t stop people from trying, does it? Elrond, just answer my question.” 

Elrond cracks his knuckles, tries to send off some of his nervous energy into the air bubbles. “No, it wouldn’t… if you were the kind of person who relied on stereotype. Baba doesn’t fit it. It wouldn’t be obvious, no. He’s not the kind of person people imagine when they hear the word.” 

“And… what about me?” 

Fingon stretches out a bare foot, taps it softly on the floor to accompany his question. His anklet makes a faint jingle from under his slacks. Elrond says nothing and the older man nods, satisfied by his silence.

“Exactly. You have only ever seen me as Fingon-uncle, your father’s partner who has loved him since he was five years old. When we’re outside, you usually see me at the convent, in the company of girls and nuns exclusively, or in the company of Russo. My Russo, the biggest thug this town has seen. Correct?” 

Elrond nods. 

“But out there, Elrond, out there to everyone else, I am Finnu with the silver anklets. Finnu with the moonstone earrings, understand?” he strikes a saucy, girlish pose, one hand on his hip and tosses his hair back, a direct contrast with the abject misery on his face. “Dance-teacher Finnu with the ribbons in his hair. Whose heart is laid so bare upon his chest that the nuns let him teach dance at a girl’s convent, whose wrongness is so visible that parents let their teenage daughters be guided so closely by a strange man. That is the Fingon you don’t see—Kozhikode’s finest chaandupottu. You know that word, don’t you?” 

“I do, yes,” Elrond mutters, grimacing. He’d grown up here, after all, knew all the regional manifestations of schoolboy viciousness. Chaandupottu, when used as a noun, was a pretty portmanteau referring to the ash-coloured mark Hindu women wore on their foreheads. The adjective form of the word, when used against boys and men, took on a cruel bent: there’s no direct translation in this case, though there are several equivalents in every language. Sissy, batty-boy, pansy, poof, fruit-loop. 

“They’d call me that when I was at school, and, well… I didn’t stop, obviously. With the anklets and ribbons and all that. Still. It got to me. Of course it did, hearing it day in and day out. Primary school, what, nine-ten years old, I’d cry about it most afternoons. And it would infuriate Russo to no end, hearing people call me that and watching me cry. He’d hit them hard enough to knock their teeth out, even then. We have a little in joke, your Baba and I. That he got all his political career training in primary school, thanks to me and my stupid ribbons.” 

“My father was high up in the local church, as you know. And when he found out what it really was between Russo and I, I was… eighteen, no, nineteen. The year after Russo found you both,” Fingon continues, moving over to sit on the platform beside Elrond. “Not sure to this day what exactly pissed him off more: the fact that it was a man, or the fact he was from a Muslim family. He bought the little house you know as ours, and registered the deed in my name. And then he sold the home I grew up in, which had been in our family for decades and moved my whole family, brother and sisters and all, to Cochin, eight hours away. I see them once a year at Christmas. One week I stay, and no more than that.” 

Elrond places an arm around Fingon’s shoulders and squeezes lightly, in lieu of saying anything. He doesn’t draw it away, and Fingon doesn’t shake him off. 

“At least in school, it was only Malayalam we spoke, so I was only chaandupottu Finnu. That is a small blessing. I did an arts diploma, you might have been too young to remember. I took those evening classes at the CSI complex, and it was English that we spoke there. You see my name? See the letter it starts with? You have an English degree, three in fact. See my name, Elrond. What do you think they called me there? Finnu the… what do you think? Hm? Such a catchy nickname it was. American English. Finnu the what?” 

“I’m sorry, uncle,” Elrond closes his eyes. “I know what it would’ve been. I’m sorry.” 

“The day after I finished my last class, my Russo knocked on the door of the tutor. Broke his arm in two places, for letting such a thing go on under his nose,” Fingon turns to Elrond, looking somewhat cheerier. “You might be wondering why I’m telling you all this? What it has to do with anything? Maybe that I just want you to feel bad for me?” 

“Well…” Elrond jokingly hesitates, and Fingon laughs. “Fine, fine. Not the last thing. But yes, the other two, I suppose.” 

“Did you know your Baba once stood to be an MP?”

“Fingon, somehow that’s only made me more confused as to what the hell you’re on about,” Elrond starts to laugh in earnest, and his uncle joins in. “No, I didn’t. I assumed it wasn’t his thing… and Elros never told me. When was it? I assume after we left, since the first election was… what? 1957?”

“Oh, Elros probably forgot, he wasn’t too high up in the Party at the time anyway so wouldn’t have known much more than the average person. It wasn’t a massive issue, got smoothed over relatively quickly. But yes, in 57’, our first election, Maedhros ran for the Kozhikode seat.”

He tells Elrond how the Communist higher-ups had told Maedhros to run for MP in Kozhikode, and Maedhros had actually agreed to it. The Party wanted him to run not despite his reputation for violence and terror charge, but because of it: the specific advantage Maedhros Fëanorian had was, in fact, precisely how well versed he was in the homecooked brutalities of local politics. He wasn’t an orator in the Nehruvian sense of the word, but the Communists weren’t exactly Nehruvians to say the least. Their man could stir up any crowd, would jump on the fastest vehicles and hang off buses shouting slogans. He spent his four years in prison acting as the Marxist equivalent of a missionary, till they had to let him go early due to the sheer number of backroom Bolshevik baptisms he ended up performing, many under the threat of a battering. He was front and centre of every angry mob, a torchbearer in the literal sense of the word. He was the furthest thing from a statesman, and he’d have swept the election in his sleep. 

It would have meant he’d have to tone down the violence, though they promised to let him maintain at least a cursory presence at most clashes, but it was a position that would have given him more of a platform, work beyond the district, and it guaranteed himself and his family a level of protection he’d otherwise not be entitled to. In addition to that, Maedhros was the type of person who would have found ‘making a ruckus on a national stage’ an extremely amusing pastime, playing Parliament and its British-educated parliamentarians like tablas. And, Fingon added with a snort, he wanted to see Prime Minister Nehru’s face when he realised that one of the newly-elected MPs of the state that had been a consistent pain in his arse, was in fact the same boy who once made him sit through that slapstick comedy routine about Gandhi’s fast and mutton biryani. 

It had all gone according to plan, with early polls showing the voter base being overwhelmingly in favour of Maedhros, and the man himself had played his part perfectly. Until his opponent had given a speech in which he mentioned, not Maedhros’ own ‘sexual deviancy’ (an often trod and violently blockaded route), but instead urged the constituents to ‘look at his friend, that chaandupottu dance teacher, and tell me you want that man representing you’. Maedhros had, as expected, thrashed the man publicly—something the Party would have happily forgiven him for, considering it was the very reason they selected him. Much to their surprise, however, Maedhros had then marched straight to the district office two hours later and withdrew his candidacy, stating openly that he would never run again. The opposing party, the Indian National Congress, had comfortably won the Kozhikode seat, and the Communists never forgave Maedhros for his withdrawal. 

“So he withdrew because they insulted his private life?” Elrond frowns, confused. “But, and I’m not saying it isn’t bad, but doesn’t he hear that sort of thing all the time? I could swear he’s handed out at least a few duffing-ups just this election for the same reason.” 

“No, not because they insulted him. I’d thought it was that at first. It was only years later that Celegorm told me what Russo said, when he asked him why on earth he withdrew,” Fingon’s voice trembles. “Because of my Finnu, he said. Because the whole country would look at my Finnu and call him a chaandupottu, and I wouldn’t be able to give them hell for it like I can do in this town. Because they’d look at him, and they’d laugh. The whole country, he said. They’d turn my Finnu into a joke. He realised, you see. He realised what people would think when they see me, realised that it isn’t what they’d think about him. He could have just kept me quiet. How many politicians do we know, hell, even in our own party, that have dirtier secrets? This would have been nothing. But still, he didn’t even think about taking a chance. Two hours, Elrond. Two hours. This is the man who once threw a bomb at a policeman, the man who orchestrated a crowd crush that scattered the Viceroy’s car convoy. And he withdrew his candidacy in two hours because someone called me a playground taunt.”

He turns to Elrond, brows drawn tight with pain over his spectacles. 

“Battered wife?” Fingon whispers. “How could you say such a thing, Elrond? He’s your father.” 

Elrond ducks his head, flushing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think, I just… I didn’t think about how the words sounded. I should have an excuse, I wish I did, but I don’t. I was wrong to say that of you, and of him. I just… I just found myself thinking in that moment, watching you pick up those pieces, I just found myself wondering why you were still with him. Whether it was… what there was in your love for him that weathers such storms?”

“It’s not that though, is it?” Fingon continues. “It wasn’t a barb you intended, and I know you didn’t mean it to hurt. It isn’t that, Elrond. I know you so well, even now. You aren’t cruel. It’s that you cannot see him, cannot see all of him—this question you’re asking me now, it proves that beyond doubt. You keep talking about your Baba, not realising that I’m talking about my Russo.”

“But my father and your partner are the same person, Fingon. But I understand what you mean. He isn’t… he isn’t like that with you. Isn’t that what you’re telling me? Still. Just because he’s good to you doesn’t mean he’s not… just. It doesn’t mean he’s good in general. Even the worst dictators have been good to their wives, have been devoted fathers and mothers. Even Indira, her sons idolise her so fervently, don’t they? I don’t understand why you’re telling me it’s wrong to think of your Russo and Maedhros as the same person.” 

“I have told you this multiple times. Your father is not a good man,” Fingon says patiently. “There is goodness in him, but he is himself far from good. Nor am I saying anything about morality or right and wrong. In fact, I’ll tell you right now that I’m not correct. I’m not right, and you’re not wrong. Hand on heart, Elrond, I am being a selfish bastard right now, selfish to see only the parts of Russo he directs towards me. All I am asking for is your understanding.” 

“Then help me understand,” Elrond looks at him, open and curious. “Why do you choose to see only the part of him he directs to you, if you know that isn’t the right way to look at him?” 

Fingon shrugs, smiling sheepishly. “Because it is mine.” 

“Yours?”

“I know, I know, it sounds a little… capitalist,” Fingon laughs, widening his eyes in mock-horror before schooling his face again. “No, listen. I know that Comrade Maedhros is a violent man, and that your Baba, the terrorist, is opaque and unpredictable and prideful, that Maglor’s brother can be manipulative and hardheaded and patriarchal, that Elladan and Elrohir’s grandfather doesn’t realise what their idolisation of him could do to them, that our Elros’ father is, even if indirectly, partially responsible for his fate. I know all this. I know none of these men are good men.” 

“But don’t you ever say that my Russo is not good to me, and kind, and self-sacrificing. Don’t you take his goodness from me. It was I who built him, it was I who corralled his kindness. All these years, I have kept it safe and alive in the same place I keep his lost potential and foreclosed futures, fed it and watered it every day of my life— it is mine. I do not hold the key because I inherited the house, I hold it because it was I who maintained its walls. Every time the world shatters him, I put my Russo back together… I do not have the strength to do the same for all these other fragments of him. I cannot carry the Comrade, but I will carry Russo. When his knees gave out at this very doorstep after having to dig in the dirt for his son, it was I who helped him to his feet. When you boys were sent back and Maglor entered a state of collapse, it was I who made sure Russo, in prison, was not told. When he left this house after your brother was murdered, and you can hate me for this if you wish, it was I who knelt at Maglor's feet and begged him to not tell you, because your sorrow would have taken my Russo from me. Russo, that good man, that kind man, he is mine. It was I who made him because I love him, and I will not have anyone take him from me—not even his sons. This is the one selfishness I admit to.”

“And because there is no one else,” Elrond says perceptively, cutting and empathetic at once. “For either of you. Not here.” 

“And is that such a bad thing? To carve out some joy when there is none written for us?” Fingon asks wearily. Suddenly, Elrond remembers that his father and Fingon were not the young men he’d known. “When you and your professor tell us about all these… what is it? Gay marches, communities, gay book clubs. What else? Sleeping clubs?”

“Nightclubs, uncle. And it’s not exactly all fun and games over there either.” 

“Did I say it was fun and games? I never said that. But yes. Nightclubs, fight clubs, whatever. Challenging the police in the street itself. These parties and all you have in the summer… street parade protests. It’s another world, Elrond. Even what they have in Delhi and Bombay, those underground bars and all. We’re old, Elrond. And we’re set in our ways. Maybe one day Kozhikode will have all that, but I will not be there to see it and nor will your father. Is it so wrong for us to carve some happiness out of each other?” 

“Don’t say that,” Elrond says softly, tightening his hand on Fingon’s shoulder. “That you won’t see it, I mean. Don’t. If it can happen there, then it… it’s not impossible, that it could happen here. And, as you say, there are already those underground bars up North, there could be some here soon. Perhaps in Cochin… or you can even go up…” he blinks at the image, and then shakes his head. “No, actually, no, never mind, forget it.” 

“Can we?” Fingon does actually laugh now, a true laugh. “And what, Elrond? Your father? In a gay club? In bloody Bombay? The man refuses to wear anything that isn’t a mundu, has never touched a drop of alcohol in his life, and has a reflexive hatred of both Hindi and English. Put him in one of those clubs and watch him punch the first person he sees.” 

Elrond snorts, tries not to, and ends up choking. “Right, that’s why I said forget it—oh fuck, I shouldn’t laugh at this, Fingon!” 

“Oh, laugh away, I’ve spent half my time picturing it since the day I found out those places exist and it only gets funnier. But, Elrond… you do understand, don’t you?” Fingon reaches out, takes Elrond’s hand and presses it between both of his. “He’s all I have. And perhaps I would have been some downtrodden wife shackled to her own marriage, had I married Elrond’s Baba, the terrorist. But I did not marry Elrond’s Baba, the terrorist. I married my Russo. Who is good to me, and kind, who loves me more than anyone ever has or will. The one the world keeps trying to take from me. Let me keep that man, Elrond. Don’t you as well try and take him away with your words.”

“Was I good, achacha?” Arwen asks, all of a sudden, as if they’d not just been talking about muttonfish. Things like that happen here, every conversation can turn frantic. Her eyes are wide and afraid, and Maedhros has never seen them like that. “Was I good? Did I do something good?” 

“More than good,” he tells her. “Much more than good, Arwen.”

“Did I change the world?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But you have changed mine.”

“But the statue, achacha, the statue,” she moves closer to him, takes his hand in both of hers. He looks closer at them: calloused thumbs, nails trimmed to the quick, large pads on every heavy-knuckled finger. They seem incongruous and alien at the end of each slim wrist. “Does the statue still stand?”

“I don’t know, my Arwen,” Maedhros whispers, because he doesn’t. “I don’t know about that statue, I don’t know anything about it besides what you have written to me.”

Arwen grips his hand tighter and he stares down at her worn, incongruously heavy-knuckled fingers, each nail stained bright red-orange with henna: Muslim women tended to stain their nails in such a way, to get around the impermissible impermeability of regular polish. And that is how Maedhros realises these are Nerdanel’s long fingers and calloused palms, transposed to the ends of his granddaughter’s wrists because he has never actually seen the girl’s hands beyond a photographic blur.

“So I haven’t drowned him?” she asks, tears in her eyes. “He’s not…?”

“I don’t know,” he says again, and casts his eyes away because he doesn’t want to look at hers and find out they weren’t hers at all. “I don’t even know who that is, or what you were even doing there.” 

“You do know who it is. I told you.”

“Yes. You told me. And that’s all I know.”  

“So they won’t remember me?” 

“I will.”

Her silence tells him how little such platitudes matter in the grand scheme of things. 

“I was a good storyteller,” Arwen tells him. “They listened to me. I was fluent, like a river, but faster and brighter. They listened to me. I didn’t know they were afraid. I didn’t know they wanted the stories to be rubber-tipped, made to entertain, not to end anything.”

“Nor did I,” he tells her. “Who could fear such a wonderful thing as you?” 

She shrugs, and parrots: “Who could fear such a wonderful thing as you?”

“I’m sorry I told you those stories, Arwen,” he says quietly. “Will you ever forgive me?” 

“Do you regret telling me?” she asks. He shakes his head—no. Then she says: “then there is nothing to forgive.” 

“Did you ever expect it?” He asks her in turn. “That it would end this way.” 

“Well, I’d always wondered how it would feel to be an enemy of the state,” Arwen shrugs sheepishly. “Which I suppose was the crux of the clusterfuck, come to think of it. Still, an electrical fault? Really? You have to be joking. Please tell me it wasn’t an embarrassing fault at least. Like the plumbing backing up with sewer water, or something humiliating like that.”

“Of course that’s your main concern. The global embarrassment known as Britain’s mismanagement of shit and shitting… you really are your grandfather’s girl,” Maedhros’ smile is unmistakably affectionate, though rigid with grief. 

She returns it gratefully. The sun falls into the sea and bounces a little, like in the first page of Sea Stories, and Arwen leans into Maedhros as it starts casting swelling shadows across the water. Like a palaeontologist excavating around the fragile, intact ribcage of a prehistoric prey-animal, Maedhros slowly raises his arm and places it around his little revolutionary, giving her room to shift even closer. Then, he doesn’t move a muscle, and simply feels her live beneath his skin. How wonderfully she breathes, an entire life leaning on his shoulder, half asleep yet twiddling her thumbs because the dream will end if she stills. He is a flagellant first, a human being second. 

In tatbir, in the arena of the kuthu ratheeb, you cannot let wounds heal. This, he knows. 

“I’m not saying electrical faults are beneath me, by the way,” Arwen muses vaguely. “It’s more that I wanted to go out in a slightly more bombastic way.”

“Of course you did,” Maedhros laughs quietly. He tightens his arm around her. “My little terrorist.”

She says nothing, so he continues, just so they do not sit in silence. He says it casually, like he’s commenting on the weather. “I’ve failed you.” 

And equally blasè, she shakes her head. “No. No, you didn’t. You couldn’t have.”

“Do you think I did well?” She asks him, biting her lip. “Even if the statue hasn’t fallen. Did I change anything?” 

He doesn’t answer her. 

“Please, achacha. You’ve always been honest with me. Did I do it wrong?” 

“Why didn’t you listen?” he bursts out at last. “You stupid, foolhardy, stubborn girl. Did you not understand what I told you? Why the hell were you in that building? What on earth were you doing with fire?” 

“It wasn’t just that night,” Arwen defends herself, scowling at him. “I went in there at night every week for the past six months, this… this only happened once. And we’ve already established I had nothing to do with the fire, let alone be the one who set it.” 

“I don’t care how many times you went in there, Arwen,” he says heatedly. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that you went alone. Why would you do that? Why? Had I not told you what happens when martyrs are made?” 

He had. He’d told her that the saying ‘one person is all that is needed to spark change’ only made sense if said person had a collective behind them. That when there wasn’t a collective, or if the collective only formed posthumously, then the change-maker was less a revolutionary and more a martyr upon whom anyone could project anything. 

You cannot change the world by turning yourself into a symbol, he’d written. Symbols do shit-all. Symbols have things done to them and for them, have things done in their name. You are far more than a symbol. 

Maedhros had told her that progress moved through not through the symbolic individual actions but through contingencies—of labour, capital, coercion—he’d said every revolution began with a powder keg of mass will under immense structural pressure. Any individual gesture, however luminous and awe-inspiring, is more often absorbed than opposed, more often commemorated than repeated. This is why I mistrust the cult of the visionary, the reformer, it is why I never cared for the Gandhis and Nehrus of the world. A pulpit outside the church is just a weather-beaten pulpit, and a politics that centres the self will always be too content in its own stability to unsettle anything. 

“I never told Elros this,” he admits to her. “And so he carried on as he did. So beloved he’d been. And yet, look where he is now, Arwen. Look where my boy Elros is now. Why did you not listen to me?” 

“It was Elros-uncle who told me of the statue. How he tried to set fire to it in Devon, and how you gave him an earful when he got back for being stupid enough to think a bronze statue would burn in a wood-fire. Granny told him she’d reminded him of it too, but that he’d responded with something awfully rude.” 

“Why were you alone in that building, Arwen? You should not have been there alone. How many times? How many times have I told you?” Maedhros scolds her, because in the dream she’s alive and you can scold a living grandchild. Scolding Arwen—the tithe he is owed for picking up the lost children of the sisterfucking chutiya Viceroy’s… yes, yes, all of that. They’d chased each other’s tails, circled the drain for the past ten years, and so he can scold her and he does.

“Ada took my hands, and said I was the bravest girl in the world,” Arwen says dreamily, as if he’d not said anything at all. “The bravest girl in the world. He said it just like that, his voice so open and awed. I felt like the bravest girl in the world.” 

“That is no excuse!” 

“Professor Gil-galad introduced me to Aragorn, you know,” she ignores his exclamation. “Told him I was the finest student activist Oxford would ever see. In my first week at uni… he’d let me shadow one of the third-year classes he lectured for, about insurgency in South Asia. That’s how he introduced me to his class.” 

“But none of that means anything at all in the face of your great big institution! It matters less than nothing to the police! Even less to your country!” He finds himself standing, gesticulating like a madman. “Why would you have gone alone? Why didn’t you call your… what was it? Rally participants? Why couldn’t they go in with you? Could you not have told your father? Your grandmother? Your mother?” 

“I can’t speak a single word of Bengali,” Arwen dangles a hand lazily out of the boat, letting it skim the waves. “Did you know that, achacha? But apparently, I’d been quite a chatty baby.” 

“The point of a revolution, the point of any progress, Arwen! How many times? Did I not say to never fall into politics of gesture? What would your fire have even done? Bronze doesn’t burn, girl! Nothing you did would have gotten that statue to melting point. It would never have burned!” 

“I DIDN’T SET IT ON FIRE!” She rises at last, flushed and frantic, finally looking every part the chastised child she is. “You know I didn’t! You know it! You know it, because Ada told you and Gil-galad told you! You know it because you know me, achacha, you know me! I didn’t set anything on fire! I know bronze doesn’t burn! You told me! You told me so many times!” 

The boat suddenly jerks and twitches like a nerve in a dying limb, its hull gracelessly scraping the swells. The sea lifts it and drops it without care, and Arwen loses her balance, dislodged like a sculpture from its plinth. Maedhros reaches out swiftly, grabs her and holds her close as the waves churn, unwilling to let this statue drown, join the waterlogged and eyeless army beneath the foam. The boat begins to feel like something between plough and excavator, gobbling away the tranquil surface a little more with each frothy, acrobatic wave it churns up. 

And then Arwen leans over the side, laughing. 

“Arwen, get back to the centre!” he’s ankle-deep in seawater, bare feet scraping the bottom of the boat. “You’ll tip it, get back!” 

“No, achacha, look!” she points into the whitewater. “He’s there. He’s where I was trying to put him! He’s right there! Oh, I told you didn’t I?” 

Maedhros braces a leg on the stern so it wouldn’t tip when he leans to look at where she’s pointing. He sees nothing at all, not even fish. He looks at Arwen, and then around her, to pinpoint where the sudden squall came out of. But there’s nothing there either. There is no storm. No wind, not even a shift in the faintly rancid air. Just their rocking, gasping boat, a stoppered breath rattling behind a ribcage. 

Maedhros returns to himself with a shudder, the final drumbeat marking the moment he throws down his sword. Blood runs comfortingly down his spine and he stands there for a moment, as dazed and silent as a fresh shipwreck. Talking to Arwen during the ratheeb isn’t what surprises him, he considers as he makes his slow way home. The ritual, like being lulled to sleep on Fingon’s lap, is one of the few times times he ever feels connected enough to his body to have anything as mindless as a dream. 

The first time I performed the ratheeb, he’d once written to Arwen, feeling the burn of the sun on my face, transfixed by the movement of light as it shifted between my feet and the second between the talwar touching my back and the burst of feeling, I experienced my own body in a way I never had before: not only witnessing it as I normally do, but entering it before the world blotted it away again. My performance of the ratheeb was never a means of controlling myself or my ‘way to speak’ as your father told you, it was simply a way to recognise my body’s connection to my self without attempting to make one master the other… that’s all it ever was, my little revolutionary—a confrontation rather than a solution.

He’s spoken to everyone and everyone whilst thrashing himself, from a fistfight with Gandhi to falling at the feet of his mother. And Elros, too. So often. So Arwen turning up doesn’t concern him. But the oddness of the vision, even beyond its Khasak-meets-Elrond levels of surrealism, disturbs him beyond the daily disturbances that play out in his head. 

He can’t put a finger on it. It isn’t that she’s told him anything new. None of the ritual-dreams ever tell him anything new: he is, thankfully, no prophet. The stories, the anecdotes, those had all been shared between them across the decade. Arwen had been right. He did tell her all those things. And she did tell him too. Still, it eats at him all the way home, where Elrond and Fingon are sitting on the verandah together, laughing at something-or-the-other, apparently having signed a truce in whatever cold war had existed between the two for the past week. Maedhros watches them fondly for a moment, but he’s tired, and his eyes unfocus themselves and stare at something just beyond them. 

I went in there every week, for the past six months. 

All the blood seems to rush from his head, and a delirious grin blooms across his face. A singular moment, in which all of Maedhros Feanorian is reduced to a choked-out laugh. 

You know it because you know me, achacha. 

“Russo?” Fingon calls out, breaking him out of his sudden stupor. “Russo, go round the back to the outhouse, Maglor’s going to stab you with your own talwar if you go dripping blood on the sitting-room floor again.” 

Maedhros blinks, rather stupidly. 

“What the hell’s wrong with your face? Why are you grinning like that? Have you finally cracked?” Elrond snorts, looking far too comfortable sitting on his arse. It is this that brings Maedhros fully back into himself, because of course it is. 

“You,” he snaps his fingers twice at Elrond and points to the back of the house. “Bathwater, six buckets at least, and if it’s not hot enough to make crab curry when I get to the outhouse I’ll skin you alive.” 

“Six?” His son scowls. “Why the hell do you need six buckets? If you’re planning to drown  yourself, the sea is right behind you and the lake is to your left.”

“Hello, Backtalk Basheer, just because you call your Mummy a c-u-n-t doesn’t mean you can do the same with me. Make it seven buckets, I’ve been at the ratheeb for an hour. Off you go,” Maedhros watches him roll his eyes and trot off, not without childish satisfaction. 

The c-u-n-t comment had, across the past couple of weeks, turned from a little joke with no factual basis that Celebrimbor pulled out of his arse about Elrond only ever addressing his mother with profanities, into something that the cliff-house inhabitants believed with an almost religious fervour. It must also be said that they were assisted to no small degree by the willing participation of Elwing herself, who wholeheartedly played along to the extent of recounting to Maglor multiple completely untrue incidents in which the poor, painfully polite Elrond had referred to her with derogatory slurs, including dedicating his graduate thesis to “my fathers, brother, Cel, my little Arwen, and that peroxide-blonde old bitch in Devon.” 

Maedhros turns to Fingon who had been scowling in confusion and moves closer to whisper in his ear, only to be pushed away. 

“Ugh, Russo, you’re sweating like a pig, and bleeding through another damned shirt. Get off! I’ll go get the turmeric.”

“If you have that much of a problem with it you can go help Elrond draw my bath. Now, listen, forget the turmeric—Finnu—can you get—get—get me the phone book?” Maedhros stammers, white-faced and smiling still. “Don’t say anything to anyone, just bring it from my study upstairs. And then we’ll go back to our place after dinner and spend the night there, if you don’t mind.” 

“That’s fine, but why? Wanted to get a round in without your brothers imitating a steam train for the next twenty four hours?”

“No, but now that you mention it, that’s also a bonus. Actually, I need to make a phone call, and I don’t want to do it here,” Maedhros lowers his voice, peering around the front doorway to make sure nobody was in the sitting room. “So can you get me my phonebook? The one with the foreign numbers, I need that brainfucker from Oxford.”

“Who, Gil-galad?” asks Fingon, confused. “What happened? Why him? And why are you smiling like a lunatic? Did Indira Gandhi drop dead or something? American president got terminal food poisoning?”

“No, nothing,” Maedhros says shortly, and then catches the flicker of disappointment on Fingon’s face. No secrets between Maedhros-and-Fingon, he thinks, sighing. Still, he is a little afraid. He reaches out and grabs the other man’s hand, pulls him closer. “Sorry, Finnu. I need that one because he’s a history professor. I want him to check something.”

“You do know that is somehow more confusing than Indira Gandhi dropping dead, don’t you?” A muscle jumps in Fingon’s jaw. “I’d rather you not tell me than play games with me, Russo.” 

“I… I’ll tell you the whole thing when we get to ours. I promise,” Maedhros clears his throat, wincing awkwardly. “I just… I need to show you as well. And I don’t know if I can… I don’t know. If I can hold it together when I do. It has to be at ours, not here. But I promise I’ll tell you tonight itself.” 

Fingon’s face softens at the faltering sentences, and he squeezes Maedhros’ hand, presses a quick kiss to the knuckles.

“Fine, fine,” he huffs out a laugh, turning indoors. “But we’re going in my car, mind you. I refuse to ride pillion on your death trap after eating dinner.”

Maedhros watches him go, distracted and dripping all over the verandah floor. 

“She’ll outlive us all—“ he whispers to himself, still awestruck. “I told her. I knew it. I knew it. That stubborn, aggravating child. I told her. I know her.”

Chapter Text

“Together through the ages of the world, we have fought the long defeat.” — The Fellowship of the Ring

Then:

If Nerdanel and the seventeen-year-old Maglor had been one of the insufferable social realists of their era, they would absolutely have spent the first two days of the latter’s impromptu three-day visit to the site of his mother’s hunger strike describing in painstaking detail how Delhi Junction Station’s entrance smelt. Crowds arching in waves of tragic, perceivable individuality, something-something dusty corners of history, with a contrived comparison between the reasonably-maintained redbrick of the station and the demolished marble of the Red Fort gesturing to the circumstances of Nerdanel’s forlorn patronage of the sheltered spot. 

Thankfully, our two postmodernists plucked before their time deemed the symbolic value of both buildings to be unknowably and time-consumingly vast and chose instead to spend the hours picking out “spectacularly ill-endowed” passerby and developing a system in which Nerdanel drew an on-the spot caricature of each unfortunate soul, whilst Maglor composed an impudent and discourteous couplet about them. 

താടിയല്ലേ പെരുവഴിയിലെ പാറപോലെ,

ബുദ്ധിയില്ലാതൊരു ഭാരം മാത്രമതിലെ.

That’s no head—it’s a roadside boulder,

No brain inside, just a weight on his shoulder.

കസേരയെ ഞാൻ കണക്കാക്കിയിരുന്നേ,

പിന്നാലെ കണ്ടപ്പോൾ അതാവളെന്നരിഞ്ഞേ

 I thought that was just a stuffed armchair left behind here —

Then madam turned ‘round… and turns out it’s her derriere!

Nerdanel sat at the entrance of Delhi Junction Station not because it was a protest site like, say, India Gate, but rather because it was the home of the East India Railway Company, which owned the trains her twins had boarded before they returned to the earth, just as lost, just as small and no longer alive. The issue, Nerdanel had told Maedhros two months prior, was not that the East India Railway Company were responsible for her sons’ deaths. 

Though in a roundabout, historically-conscious way, the Company absolutely were responsible, the little boys had in reality mistakenly gotten on the wrong train to Calcutta at the wrong time, because their mother had let go of their hands in the crowd (an easy thing for a mother to do in the wrong place at the wrong time, as we begin to understand) and the two children got caught in a religious riot which broke out on board. As such, they were (probably, as neither she nor we would ever actually know, the lack of bodies leading to an influx of bracketed conjectures) killed by either Hindus or Sikhs, or their own kin, fellow Muslims. It was one and done, a flash pan microcosm, a testing ground for ten years later, when the violence of Partition saw burning trains running back and forth at all hours of the day. 

The Company, technically speaking, had sparkling clean hands in the case of the actual deaths, and the railway officials had even been kind to her at the moment she was told of the train riots, giving her a bed in the office when she’d passed out. The actual problem however, Nerdanel reminded her son, was that they did not return their bodies to her. Not because they lost them, which would have been tragically understandable. It was because they never actually bothered to look, tending to discount ‘train violence’ as a sunk cost of civilising the masses and installing a transport network in a region so prone to religious tension. After all, India had spent the last two thousand years sending beseeching missives to the Saxons and Celts about how much they would love a semi-functional railway network running on warp time, bad intentions and whatever slurry bursts out of whale blowholes every so often. They couldn’t go back now. 

“It wasn’t that they didn’t want to find them, Maedhros. It was that they had no means to do so, because there’s no system that records the death of little twin boys from Kerala who happened to get on the wrong train. They had made a gap for violence, you see, written it into their laws. When someone who wasn’t meant to fall into that gap, say, a child or two, does actually fall in and get swallowed, there’s no contraption to raise them out, unless they were to stick their finger in and upset the entire mechanism. Which they won’t do.”

“So it would be fucking pointless for you to go and ask them anything! Then why the fuck do you need to go to their bloody offices, in fucking Delhi of all places, and do a hunger strike?” Maedhros had railed at her, furious and prematurely grieving and terrified of being left to run the family. “Are you fucking insane, woman? I forbid it. I’ll go torch the damn place for you fucking tomorrow, Ammë, if you let go of this ridiculous idea! Don’t you dare step foot outside this house!”

“Are you done?” 

Nerdanel had raised her eyebrows, amused by the idea of her son, not even out of his teens, her son trying to forbid her to do anything after having spent sixteen years watching his father fail at forbidding her to do anything. And Maedhros had then wept and begged her, but she’d already made up her mind. There was nothing she could do about religious riots in the North or the East or anywhere at all, and there was even less she could do about the British penchant for record-keeping not extending to little boys who had recently bleached and henna-dyed their hair red to match their oldest brother. 

“I don’t want to change the world, Maedhros. I just want to watch it squirm.” 

And squirm the Company did. She turned into an uncomfortable, unavoidable speck in the corner of their eyes, a blip in their morning commute. You couldn’t repackage and repurpose a hunger strike until after the deed, and so whilst Nerdanel lived she made them squirm. She kept on, hand-painted portraits of the little boys propped beside her staring straight into the glass-fronted offices of the Company. When someone who passed by gave her a cup of water and asked why she continued to do such a thing, and whether she couldn’t just put the photos of the twins up near the window and not do a hunger strike, Nerdanel said “because I’m the only one who can tell them apart” though it made very little sense. Well. Why shouldn’t the death of your children undo you completely? 

Maglor came to visit her even though she’d forbidden them all from even trying. Six trains he took, and for that she loved him, though she gave him an earful and a half for even thinking about it. Maglor had been her most obedient boy, miles apart from Maedhros who stopped listening to anyone at the ripe old age of five, apart even from the little twins who prized the other above all else. She called him Laurie, because much to Fëanor’s consternation and Maedhros’ disdain, Maglor had always preferred Little Women out of all the Malayalam translations of English stories Nerdanel had read to the boys. 

“It’s not because of the women,” Fëanor had muttered, though it was in part because of the women. “An American book, though. You really know how to pick them, don’t you?”

“Yes, I am indeed at fault for choosing an American book to read to him,” his wife had nodded, offering him a plaintive stare before she rolled her eyes. “After all, we have no quarrel with the British, do we?” 

Nerdanel hoped that her Laurie would keep the cliff-house going even as the deed remained in his brother’s name, but she asked him to do no such thing because she wasn’t Fëanor and saw no point in extracting deathbed oaths. Instead, the two of them spent hours on end making fun of unsuspecting passerby, of which there were many, wondering whether the new Viceroy’s convoy would show up at the station, as the officials often took a trip to the cool foothills of Shimla around this time of year. And then conversation swivelled back home, to how Curufin had begun a secondary-school gambling ring using Celegorm as muscle, and that Caranthir had somehow become a shareholder in said illicit business without lifting a finger. Sweets, apparently, were the currency. 

Maedhros had apparently begun inviting Fingon over for breakfast most days in addition to the dinners he already turned up to, and (as Maglor noted with no small amount of relief) he had even started staying over on weekends, which mattered very little to the rest of them aside from the fact that Fingon would actually volunteer to fetch Maedhros’ bathwater. 

“I see my beloved boy has wasted no time in installing his bride at home, and that Fingon has in turn wasted no time in turning into the dutiful wife,” Nerdanel said drily. “Never have I seen someone so perfectly cut out of the patriarchal cloth than your brother, and that includes his father.”

“Wait, he told you about him and Fingon?” Maglor exclaimed, half-confused and half-offended, as he’d been the only one privy to the information in question, and had been very pleased at having been taken into his elder brother’s confidence. “Ikka told you? He said he only told me! Oh, I can’t believe he told you, Ammë!”  

“No, he didn’t tell me, absolutely not. My firstborn speaks primarily through beatings and unintelligible noises that I can only assume is the language crocodiles use to communicate with each other, Laurie-boy. Do you actually think he’s going to tell me something like that?” she snorted. “No, I just figured it out myself.”

“And you’re all right with it?” 

“Well, I’d have preferred my first daughter-in-law to have a few more functional braincells than that boy,” she sighed, winking at Maglor and adjusting her headscarf. “More than once have I caught Fingon absent-mindedly trying out dance steps with his feet when waiting to cross the road. Without your ikka to look out for him, I tell you Laurie, all it will take is one absent minded lorry driver and a particularly catchy qawwali tune to put an end to our dearest Finnu. However, the Quran does say there is a noble reward for those who help the less fortunate, and I am certain the definition can be applied to airheads too. And, well. Allahu-alaam, at least he is pretty.”

“Does ikka know you know?” Maglor asked, still shocked. “Or did you not tell him?” 

“No, of course I didn’t. It’s not something a boy tells his mother. Or father, to be truthful to you… I feel like your Baba, all political progressiveness aside, would probably have nodded, winced and never mentioned it again. And your brother knows he is the way he is, and subanallah, thank the Lord, he is unapologetic about it. That, at least, I have been able to give him. Or perhaps he’s just too bullheaded to care. Either way, it is a blessing.” 

Nerdanel did, however, speak to Fingon. The boy’s mother had died when he was very young, so she’d essentially been a surrogate parent, albeit in a singular aspect. Fingolfin loved his children and came from money, so Fingon and his siblings never truly wanted for much. 

But Fingolfin had also been a church man, one who studied theology for a year at a Catholic institution in England when his oldest son was nine or ten. And upon his return, Nerdanel had noticed a change in him—in the way he looked at and behaved around Fingon. Not hostile or unloving, but suspicious and a little fearful. Afraid there was a certain something in the boy that Fingolfin had observed in its mature, final form at the seminary, forcing him into a premature epiphany. 

He never treated Fingon differently to his siblings, no, it wasn’t neglect or blame. He didn’t even resent the boy for the latent difference he may-or-may-not have recognised within him. Still, across the years, Fingolfin had developed the air of a priest pacing just outside the bounds of a haunted house, perpetually primed for the inevitable exorcism he would be called upon to perform. 

“You don’t mind then?” Fingon had asked, awestruck, when she told him she’d haunt him forever if he took the blow and let Maedhros accept any of the proposals that were certain to come flying in for her six-four green-eyed beautiful boy, as aggravating as his actual personality was. “That he loves me? He… he’s your eldest son, sahiba. And you’re fine?”

“There’s not a soul in this world that I would be happier to see my eldest son spend his life with. There is nobody who suits our own Maedhros better than our own Finnu. You were made for each other. And no sahiba, boy. Ammë or nothing.”

“Truly you mean it?” he asked. And then in English: “Mother promise?” 

A lump had caught in Nerdanel's throat then, at the innocent, common phrase. Mother promise, a colloquialism, an equivalent of cross your heart? 

“Mother promise,” she echoed. Then Fingon smiled through his tears, and allowed her a glimpse of the stars within him. Stars that lived and delighted in living, stars turning tiny somersaults in faraway galaxies, snuffed out stars from foreclosed futures, disparate fragments of light drifting in the gluttonous dark. Nerdanel didn’t understand how anyone could ever look at the boy sitting before her, and not think of him as anything other than her oldest son’s other half.  

Just look at you, she’d thought, her face softening. Carved from his very rib. 

“I have seen many stories like theirs play out,” she explained, leaning her head on Maglor’s shoulder. “The prejudice the world has towards people like your brother, such hatred is not designed to take only one victim. Bigotry is a factory, Laurie, not a market stall. It deals in bulk, not precision. It will poison the well, then sell casks of water. Do you remember Indis-sahiba? Our old neighbour.”

“The elderly lady? Who died when I was, what, ten?”

“The very same,” Nerdanel smiled. “Her husband, Finwë. You remember him too?” 

Maglor nodded. 

“He was like your ikka.”

“Eh?” Maglor frowned. “Like ikka? What, you mean… with boys?” 

“Exactly that,” Nerdanel told him. “For him, it was one of the men who worked in a sahib’s house, over in Vatakara. He’d take a bus to see him, around twice a week or thereabouts… he’d take a bus at nine in the morning and come back only late. And Indis-sahiba would sit at home, feeding their children and looking after the house, knowing full well where Finwë was and what exactly he was doing.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. That’s awful of him to just..”

“Is it?” Nerdanel asked mildly. “She did not think so, and nor do I. What could she do? Who among us has the right to blame Finwë, who had been just as trapped as his wife? He told his Baba about his preference when he was younger, Indis told me once, and the very next day his Baba arranged a marriage for him. She was thirteen, and he was fifteen. What could either of them do?” 

“And so they just… lived like that?” Maglor frowned, shaking his head. “Lived apart in the same house? I’ve read about such things happening in the Britishers’ countries. Like men like ikka and, ah, the women like that as well, those like that with women. Marriage of convenience, the writers call it. It’s strange to think such things exist in Kozhikode too… seems hardly plausible.”

“That’s because it isn’t. Finwë was a milkman, Laurie. He’s not exactly Ustad Shakespeare,” his mother tweaked his ear. “And it can’t be a marriage of convenience unless both of them get something out of it. Still. What else could Finwë have done? Go climb on the sahib’s roof and declare his love for their gardener? Run away from home at fifteen amidst a famine? He too was trapped. It could have gone two ways: either Finwë would wither away and die of sheer loneliness, or Indis would. See what I mean, Laurie? There is no hatred in this world that is not designed to spread, to take more victims than it claims to.”

She paused for a few minutes to sketch out a man with a mole the size of his ear, sporting its very own toupee. Maglor, suddenly shivering from an implacable dread, rose splendidly to the occasion as well, with a couplet so laden with Kozhikodan slang that it made no sense in pure Malayalam, let alone English.

പൊളിയേ കുരുവാടേ, നീ ചുറ്റും വെളുപ്പ് തിന്നു,

വെയിലത്തിറങ്ങിയാൽ കാട്ടുപോത്ത്‌ പിടിച്ചെന്നു!

“What a majestic mole — eating the face around it,

Until it shines in the sun, folks call bullshit!”

Nerdanel read it out, nodding, impressed at the weaving of vulgar colloquialism and poetic metre. She wrote it in calligraphy script next to her caricature and signed both their names with a flourish, and handed off the page to Maglor. She said nothing for a long while and the rabbit-thump of Maglor’s heart was slowly beginning to quieten, until she turned back to him. 

“You must go home this evening,” she said. Then, “I’ll not be taking water after tomorrow. I do not want you here when that begins. Understand?” 

“Ammë, please, that’s…” 

“Maglor,” she frowned, levelling him with a stern glare. “Your brother attempted all of this already, and he can talk a bull into tap-dancing. There’s no changing my mind. Please, Laurie. Let’s not waste our time weeping and arguing, hm?” 

“But…”

“Please?” she took his hand and threaded her fingers through his. “One last behave yourself or else from your Ammë, Laurie? Can you grant me this?” 

Of course he granted it to her. Maglor would have granted her anything. He would have granted her the clothes off his back. When she asked him to take the house and his brothers in hand, to ensure that life went on and on and on without end, he granted it to her. His brother Maedhros would not follow his father. Celegorm would somehow pass his tenth standard exams. The cliff-house wouldn’t implode. And so sated, she asked him what he’d sing of her when he returned home and she remained, as if to remind him that was exactly what would happen, or else. 

“Trust you to ask such morbid questions now itself,” Maglor muttered, sulking a little. “You won’t know. Never ever. That’s your choice only.” 

She laughed and flicked his ear. “You’re planning some kind of elegy, aren’t you?” 

He scrubbed his eyes and glared at her. “No, it’ll be a fucking nursery rhyme.” 

Nerdanel only laughed harder, and pulled him close. He tried his best to avoid thinking about how frail she’d gotten in just a few weeks. 

“Better a nursery rhyme than a dirge, Laurie,” she told him. “You are a singer, boy, you must find the brightest words and hoist them out of darkness. You’re no sculptor, no photographer. You will not remember me in granite and silence—you better not.”

“Then tell me what to write,” he leaned his head on her shoulder, burying his face in her headscarf. “Since you’re such a bloody expert now.” 

And so, Nerdanel did. She dictated her own elegies to Maglor because she had always been an artist, and more than that, she had always been comically matriarchal, a man and seven boys perpetually dangling off her apron strings. She had spent a whole life noticing things nobody asked her to notice, bringing them to life in her darkroom. The shadows on white walls at noon, crowds at rallies and festivals gathering like clouds, unsure then all at once. Glass and pigment, viewfinders and dust, brushes accidentally dipped in the wrong colour and swilled in a large earthen pot.

“And the Tali Shiva temple, when you were hired to paint the idols,” Maglor smiled, sitting up properly to join in. “How you painted Lord Shiva with his eyes closed, because you said he deserved a rest from that annoying priest. I can sing about that.”

“And the church! How I gave the angels bare feet, because I am sorry, Laurie, but half the congregation have never owned even leather slippers, let alone patent silk shoes,” Nerdanel chuckled. “And Fingolfin going so crazy over the idea of an angel having toenails. I hope you’ll write about that.”

The wedding in Chevayur, when the big lights had failed and plunged them all into darkness, and Nerdanel had accidentally caught the bride and groom’s canoodling silhouettes, much to the father of the bride’s consternation. The blonde sahib child who gave her a sticky toffee from his pocket because she said his little sister looked like moonlight in his mother’s arms. The ladders she climbed barefoot, toxic paintbrushes clenched between her teeth, her cracked heels she’d demand Fëanor moisturise twice a week. Every deity she painted had worn a borrowed, beloved face, at the cost of Finrod’s future crisis of faith upon realising the angel Gabriel in the church bore a striking resemblance to Celegorm. Every photograph she took showed people reaching for something. 

And that evening on the beach, when she’d organised a massive game of cricket for her sons and joined in herself, featuring the Ambarussa who had (for some reason known only to their shared brain-crumb) volunteered to serve as living wickets even though nobody had asked them to. It had been Feanor and Maedhros versus the other five, and much to the latter team’s irritation, the father and son duo had won. Cheated thoroughly and unashamedly, of course, but still, they had won. 

“Tell them I was here, and that I tried. And then, at last, tell them of this too. With this too, that I tried. Only then, and only if you must, tell them that I died.”

He would. Later, Maglor would try to write about her, and there would indeed be a book of songs about Nerdanel of Kozhikode, who painted every mural in the temples, whose husband carved the steeple of the church. He would be much older then, his first set of twins would have been ten, perhaps eleven. But in the station, he was Little Laurie, not Ustad Maglor, the music master. Laurie watching his mother fall into her customary afternoon nap, cross-legged under the sun-shelter. Trains whirled around them, slack with heat, and Laurie would take one tomorrow, bound for home. And after his train left, other trains would arrive and depart, winding around his mother and taking her away in their slow orbit. No train would stop for Nerdanel-sahiba, just enough of her covered by purdah for her departure to be chalked up to famine instead of fury. 

He didn’t know how to turn it into song, these two days, because he was only seventeen. The yellowing of her eyes, her collarbones rising as scaffolding under skin, the infantile curl of her fingers around nothing. The woman before Maglor was no martyr, she was no Gandhi: like her husband and sons, she too would have whacked Gandhi around the head with her clogs and force fed him three square meals. Put him to bed and told him the cliff-house ghost would eat him if he put a toe out of the room. Nerdanel-sahiba had been allergic to her husband’s sloganeering, suspicious of every banner that she herself did not paint. When her littlest boys had stolen lemon juice and henna and dyed their hair red to match their biggest-and-thus-best brother, she’d roared with laughter and said here, then, is the revolution! Red salute, Comrades Ambarussa! 

Maglor looked down at his notebook, in which he’d intended to pen a song about the vanishing. For now, he’d written only three words. 

എൻ്റെ അമ്മ ശ്രമിച്ചു —

My mother tried —

Now:

The bronze general Buller, twice as large as he had been in life, is anchored so firmly to his pedestal that he would not topple for centuries. He perches on his horse, mid-trample, impossible to unseat as he stares passerby down impassively, a wolf deciding whose home he would blow down next. Nobody can touch him, he knows, for he cannot burn. Professor formerly-Sir Gil-galad also knows this, and yet despite such knowledge here he is in the back-building the University of Oxford kept their knick-knacks and stolen treasures in, peering at the fellow who looked no different to how he looked the last time he’d seen him. It had been some weeks after the fire, when the statue was moved in preparation for its reinstallation atop Magdalen College. 

Gil-galad’s current position is, like many things in the world, entirely the fault of a certain Comrade Maedhros, who had phoned him up three days prior insisting that he take another look at the statue. And when Gil-galad asked him what prompted such an epiphany, albeit a half-formed one considering the man didn’t know what it was the professor was actually meant to be looking for, he’d said “a tingle in my arm hair, like world’s greatest spider”, referring apparently, to the tarantula (another creature he held a lifelong fascination with). 

But yes, here stands Professor Gil-galad looking up at the statue like an idiot, trying to spot anything wrong with the thing. Some small shift even: a tarnish in the eyelid, a faltering in the jaw. But there is nothing at all. He is a historian. He knows statues very well. How they don’t really come into meaning until the men inside them are long buried. That’s their trick. Not made for the present, but for the memory industry of the future—for children to pass by and inherit a sentiment without quite knowing the cost of a symbol, the cost of it all. 

The more distant his cruelties grow, the more magnificent the figure becomes. General Redvers Buller, who cavalry charged a mass of fleeing, unarmed Zulu men from the back, described in awe as a “tiger drunk with blood”, who commanded battalions in not just one Boer war but both. He is the best dressed mourner at his own wake. 

Gil-galad makes a final round, and makes to return and call up Maedhros and finally get one over on the aggravating fellow, when something impossible occurs to him. And for that something to be verified, he has to ungracefully clamber on top of the statue’s granite plinth, praying to every deity he has left behind that nobody would choose that moment to enter the building. Finally atop the plinth, he is briefly thankful for the early 20th century commitment to equestrian statues, finding the horse’s stirrup a perfect spot to gain leverage again. It is so precariously perched, one hand on a metallic rein and wrestling with General Buller’s great bronze boot for a foothold, that he looks closely at where Buller’s coat met the horse, the join-line. 

It looks much like the rest of the statue, a light green patina covering the metal as is both commonplace and desired when it comes to bronze monuments. The patina is permanent for the most part, and though its removal would not harm the statue, such a removal on an artefact of this age and size would require a deep application of acid and vigorous scrubbing: a genuine patina would not come off easily through, say, the scrape of a fingernail. Gil-galad tightens his hold on the rein, and uses his other hand to scrape lightly at a spot on the join-line. Almost immediately, the patina flakes off, only a quarter inch, but what does come off reveals a tiny, deep pit in the metal, and another nearby, shallower yet the size of a penny. He is a historian. He knows statues very well. 

“Fuck me, Arwen,” he gasps, losing his footing and having to clutch at the statue’s knee, whereupon a handful of blue-green flakes showered his trousers. “My God.” 

Brushing his hand off, he peers closer at where his fingernails had scrabbled: more and more little pits in the metal, some large enough to see through to where it had eaten tunnels six, seven inches deep. Finding it increasingly difficult to breathe, Gil-galad descends slowly, slipping twice. He doesn’t bother about the corrosion-disguised-as-patina he’d scratched off. At this stage, it would replace itself in a few days, long before they brought the thing back out to reinstall. He stands staring at a man who would soon be brought to his knees, though there is no triumph in the victory, only a blank, immovable sense of loss. And at the back of it all, peeping out like something caught naked in a dream, shivers guilt. 

There was only one language those people spoke back then, Maedhros once wrote to Arwen, as he told her the story of Feanor. The language of rubbing salt in the wound.

That was when Arwen Undomiel—our little revolutionary, that accidental archive—decided that Buller and his keepers deserved a taste of their very own boot. For six months, from the night of the first rally she held, to the very night she died, she’d worked on him with saline smuggled in flasks, slipping out of her College room and entering through the back door of Fuller Hall. Both murderer and mortician, she anointed him twice a week: carefully and only in the stress lines, where an accidental brush wouldn’t reveal her handiwork. 

Bronze disease, her grandfather had told her, is one of the most destructive processes any metal could undergo–and the most silent. The most coveted aspect of bronze, when it comes to public monuments like the statue, is the aesthetically pleasing greeny-turquoise patina that naturally forms. It is this patina that bronze disease emulates: the corrosion appearing as a powdery natural coating, yet underneath it the chemical processes would carve out pits in the metal, burrowing swiftly through the structure until it collapses upon itself. Patina would not come off, but corrosion would flake off at the slightest touch, like old swords over a doorway.

The textbooks, which Arwen consumed like confessionals once the idea came to her, described it more clinically. A misnomer, they said. Not bacterial, though the name itself suggests contagion. Rather, bronze disease is a cascade of reactions: cuprous chlorides, disturbed by water, transforming into hydrochloric acid—a chemical tantrum inside the metal, hidden but relentless. The acid bites inward, eats its own. The metal responds by flaking, pitting, turning to powder. After the salt has set into the bronze, even atmospheric water would hasten the process, even rainfall would catalyse the destruction, a closed loop. Not a moment but a process, as meticulous and banal as the Empire itself: a war of attrition waged at the molecular level. Corrosion not as spectacle, but as scholarship. In a way, it is like rot. 

The reaction would take months to declare itself. There are ways, of course, to treat the metal if caught early, if the corrosion hasn’t spread. But once begun, it cannot be reversed, only postponed, and the corrosion itself only visible to a trained eye looking at the artefact from up close—the fifteen-foot Redvers Buller had lived on a six-foot pedestal with a four-foot cordon around him, because the University of Oxford did not wish for anyone to be able to truly look him in the eye. And so, nobody had noticed, and the reaction had continued silently for almost eleven months. And in a statue of this bulk, with the salt applied so carefully to the joins and stress points of the structure where natural patina would be thicker, a statue which would soon be raised up to the roof of its new College, even further from the discerning eye. Well. 

General Buller would fall within the year. And Arwen wouldn’t be there to see it. 

Gil-galad knows that seven to eight thorough applications would have kicked off the process and closed the loop. According to her College’s sign-out books, Arwen had left her bed sixty seven times. Elrond and Celebrían had assumed she had just been off out, parties, library sessions, sports socials: the two of them had, after all, been students at the same university. 

“Not so, Professor,” Aragorn had told him a few weeks ago, casually when the topic has been brought up. “She almost never went out. A couple of socials, with me and the Socialist Students after the rallies, but nothing much otherwise.”

And that had confused Gil-galad, because he’d known the girl since she was barely waist high, and she had always been the furthest thing from a recluse. She was sporty, clever and extroverted enough to be aggravating in large doses. Even her silence had an irritating voltage. All who knew her would spend their lives listening out for it.

It wouldn’t have been bullying either—Arwen was not white, no, but Oxford had always been home to the scions of wealth from all around the world, and she would not have been out of place. Her father was a Professor, her grandmother well connected, and that would have stopped anything too untoward. Neither would her beliefs have been controversial, at least not to any great degree: the students tended to lean economically conservative due to their backgrounds, but there had always been progressive posturing in the academic ranks, and Arwen’s rallies and protests had always been very well attended. 

And he knew she liked to party. Elrond had been somewhat of a disciplinarian, though a laughable one, and Gil-galad had many a time in their friendship come across him giving her a dressing down over staying out too late or sneaking out of the house to go out drinking with her school friends, yet that had never stopped her. Hell, even when Elrond smelt smoke on her and went entertainingly ballistic over the cigarettes in her bag, she’d acted the perfect penitent and willingly handed over her pocket money. Only to cheerfully waltz into the corner shop the next day, and buy another pack with the secret contingency savings pot she maintained specifically for the occasions Elrond tried cutting off her allowance. In sixth form, she’d gone through boyfriends as if they were running shoes, much to Celebrían’s amusement and Elrond’s aggravation, the latter of which she’d carefully curated by making sure to prematurely declare her undying love for each one within earshot of her father, before breaking up with them the week after. 

In short, Arwen Undómiel had always been a girl who knew how to live her very best life. 

The problem, however, was that Arwen, as her mother said again and again and again, was nineteen years old. And nineteen year olds are not known for their patience. When a nineteen year old is rolled out on pedestal after pedestal, made to give speech after speech and told by everyone around her that she not only could save the world but would, it would start to eat at her in the same way she ate at the statue. 

Nineteen, Gil-galad supposes belatedly, must have been a little too young to be told how awe-inspiringly eloquent one is. How strangers twice her age would cut out memorable snippets from her talks and speeches and cite them. Cited and invited while sitting in class writing out her notes in her very best handwriting so that everyone would think she was a good student because Arwen had been nineteen and that kind of thing mattered. One of Gil-galad’s own students dedicated her dissertation to the first year, who hadn’t even considered what she’d write for her own. Arwen Undómiel, scion of privilege with a heart of gold who would decolonise the world brick by brick, fly to the moon, dropkick the sun and redeem them all from their corrosive, progressive guilt. She would become someone a university would label a terrorist, and give the order to not follow into the building she clearly must have set fire to.

Arwen who used to sneak out twice a week to party began to sneak out when she didn’t have to. Bigger and bigger the flasks of water got, the more and more trips she made. Method turned to hysteria, and because she’d been nineteen, she had gotten careless. All that salt water, in a battered old building known for electrical faults. 

“We’d have helped,” Gil-galad mutters to himself, and then stops himself there because he’s not an uncharitable man. Who would she have told? Her father, to whom she’d become everything he’d left behind yet loved? Her boyfriend, who wrote better and better headlines about a girl who had always enjoyed praise and attention? Her friends, for whom she had become a figurehead? Her history professor, who…

No, Arwen had kept it to herself. Faster and faster, night after night, wondering why the reaction didn’t show on the statue because she hadn’t had the time to have become a chemist or a historian or even much of an activist. Soon, she told herself. Soon, it’ll fall. It would become Oxford’s latest ruin, and she would be there to see it, and she would prove them all right. She would decolonise the moon and dropkick the sun, and she would do it alone.

Gil-galad leaves the building blinded by tears, unable to look at Buller for another second, having come to the fearsome understanding that looking at Buller meant looking at himself. 

“Spectacle, my dear Arwen,” he’d told her the evening after the rally, the first one she had called, two months into her first term. “Protest, true protest—must be spectacular. Arresting and eyecatching. And that is precisely why what you did today, climbing atop the bastard’s horse to give your address, was the funniest act of protest this place has seen. And to think it was our very own Arwen!” 

Arwen flushed, grinning. “It did look good, didn’t it? I did look good, didn’t I? I’ve got to think of something better for the next one… you know, I might actually have an idea.”

“Well, I’m not sure how you’ll top this one, love,” he tutted. “Front page of The Cherwell next week, Aragorn says… and I’ve told him your father will skin him alive if he’s got a bad angle from below!”

“I told her not to wear that skirt if she was going to go climbing like a monkey,” Elrond exclaimed in mock-frustration, directing one of the Socialist Students to deposit a tray of drinks at their table. He draped an arm around Arwen, pulling her close. “Cel even sent out jodhpurs to her halls, but little miss Vogue here thought that would be too comical for words. But, well, I’m far too proud of you today to resort to punishment… oh, to think you’ll topple the same statue Elros wanted to back in Devon, Arwen! I tell you, I nearly cried.”

“Ada, if you even think about doing anything half as embarrassing as that, I will be voting Tory for the rest of my life,” Arwen threatened, before turning back to Gil-galad with a wail. “And you, Professor. Et tu? Remember when you promised you’ll never tell anyone at uni that Ada and I are related? And now you’ve gone and told Aragorn! I’m humiliated!”

“Well, he can’t have been that repulsed by the idea,” Gil-galad snorted wryly. “Look, he’s waving you over.”

“And off she goes,” Elrond laughed as Arwen trotted off, though not before levying her father with a warning glare. “You need to stop encouraging her with that boy, Gil, Arwen can do miles better than him… I just know she can write a headline twice as good as any of his. And what’s so repulsive about being related to me?”

“Ask me that when you’re not wearing corduroy and have finally lived down the time you ‘dropped by’ her halls with a basket of treats, sniffing for marijuana like a cross between Father Christmas and a bloodhound, and I’ll give you an answer that won’t offend you, beloved,” Gil-galad grimaced, before shoving a third glass of wine towards his friend. “But you should be proud, what a fantastic job she did today. Standing on the horse too, it really was an inspired touch.” 

“As you said, arresting and eyecatching,” Elrond nodded. “Really, it did remind me of Elros, though I suppose Elros was a little more of an establishment politician, like Maedhros is (in his way), he’d been gunning for the MP seat the year he died. No, this was more… Fëanor. That’s my grandfather, the one I’ve told you about. Maglor and Maedhros’ father, I mean.”

“Ah, the fellow who set himself on fire?”

“The very same,” said Elrond, before wincing somewhat apologetically. “I have to admit, that was a little more extreme than our Arwen here, of course, but he did get the job done. They sent the sepoy out that very month, chucked him back here actually.”

“Well, here’s to chucking Buller out!” Gil-galad raised his glass. “And to our little revolutionary!”

“To our little revolutionary!” repeated Elrond, laughing again as Arwen inconspicuously shot him the finger, overhearing the toast. “And all the statues to come!”

Gil-galad walks down the road numbly, like someone trapped between the end of a song and the end of the tape itself, the beat or two of emptiness where the mind imposes a fading echo of the final note. Corrosion had a nauseating tendency to spread, he knows, work its way not only into the subjects but into the very heart of Empire itself, burrow into the lives of not only those doing the colonising but their children and their children and theirs. And yet it had been easier for him to chase the bookend-simplicity of dates, the finality of Independence days, as though the very danger of rot wasn’t in the lingering.

He stumbles around the quadrangle to the History Department and climbs the stairs to his office, where he leans desperately against the open window. In the late glare of spring, Oxford is bleached and cadaverous, greens parched into parchment, the structure of each building shimmering as if uncertain of their outlines. From the upper window, the quad looks embalmed: condensed droplets of black-clad students revising for the exam term, draped over stone like exhales from a smoker’s lungs. 

“I hadn’t known,” he tells himself, because he is the kind of insufferable person who tells himself such things aloud. “How could I have known, Arwen?” 

The answer doesn’t come, though he knows it already. 

Because I’m a historian. I’m a historian. 

It had not been just him. This Gil-galad knows, but it does not comfort him, because not bearing the torch in the mob does not mean you were never in the crowd. It had been all of them: him, Elrond, Elwing, Aragorn, the throngs at the rallies and the loudest singers of that child’s obituary. The cop-punchers and funeral-disruptors, the protestors and cheerers-on. They had all searched so desperately for forgiveness, hooked themselves onto parts of her. Arwen Undomiel, the bravest girl in the world, they had said over and over again, cinching themselves into the contours of her actions. Repetition begets redemption, they hoped. A duty to the academy, they called their support for her. Inertia misnamed as solidarity, it had been in truth. 

Redvers Buller would fall. This too, he knows. And in his stead there would be nothing at all, and the one who toppled him would never see his empty plinth. Because that was the problem with the method Arwen had chosen: for her ploy to succeed, nobody could know. Nobody could know what she’d been doing, or else the whole game was up. They would catch the corrosion early enough to cure. And so now when Buller fell, it would be seen as an act of god, or an omen, and not sixty seven evenings gifted by his best friend’s daughter. Arwen Undomiel, alone in the dark.

The midafternoon bell rings, and the students in the quadrangle disperse for their second exam of the day. There’s a funerary hush to it all, and Gil-galad laughs bitterly to himself when something bites him on the neck, bringing him out of his reverie: midges and mosquitoes as pallbearers. This is how a career ends—not with a bang, but an itch. 

He sits back down and begins his resignation letter. He resigns, of course, because he is not an evil man, or even a particularly bad one. That had been the issue. Gil-galad had always pictured a glamorous resignation at the cusp of retirement, a raucous departmental party with all the trimmings, but there is not a shred of pomp to this. He cannot even find the words to explain his decision, finds himself lost like Elrond had been at the memorial, staring wide-eyed at the Vice Chancellor and finding something in those beady eyes that had the potential to one day become his own reflection.

I want to leave and make myself in the after-image of one wholly herself, and —

Lately, I have realised that intellect is no inoculation against cowardice —

The relationship between consequence and spectacle is not —

We had her weave the standard and bear it to them. A war of attrition against my best friend’s daughter, and it was he and I who led the cavalry. 

We are all fucking cunts seeking

I have spent long years mistaking complication for depth, though now —

When will we learn how to name things without the impulse to consume them? 

Even now I look sideways for permission —

He isn’t sure why it is this way, why he cannot bring himself to write out the reasoning. Perhaps he is channelling Arwen too, who could not think of another way but thought she had to, in the manner of someone ordered to save the world. It is far too late to channel such things, but the possibility brings him a modicum of comfort. Tomorrow, he promises himself. I’ll tell Elrond tomorrow. 

__________________

Then, again:

The day after Maglor left, Nerdanel denied herself the water spigot, folded the station back around her and stayed where she was, spine to redbrick. It wasn’t lonely, it could never get lonely with Fëanor around. Sitting right beside her bitching and moaning about the three legged pigeon that decided to share her sleeping spot, because Fëanor had always nursed some kind of vendetta against pigeons, amongst other things. 

“I tell you, Nerdanel, these little cunts cause deformities in children. Didn’t I tell you? They eat them in Europe?” he muttered, glaring at the bird. “Shit-eating tripod, prancing around like it’s a palace. Give me a crocodile any day, respectable animals they are, compared to these fuckers.”

(Maedhros had to get it from somewhere.) 

But yes. Of course she pictured Fëanor, grinning beside her in the entranceway, a thousand swords hidden within him. Even now, even in her delirium, he did not turn into a faraway shoreline but remained the only visage as real and vivid as the hot stone Nerdanel sat upon. The month after they married, he had taken her to Wayanad Hill Station and they’d stood shyly together with cooling tea in hot porcelain cups. Sixteen years old, leaning on the railings, the two of them watched the land open up beneath them with quiet astonishment, and something had stirred in them that never quite settled again.

(This is not part of the story. It is an alibi for the person Fëanor would one day become.)

“I have never heard of anyone being born abnormal because their mother ate a pigeon, Fëanor,” Nerdanel sucked her teeth impatiently. “And they don’t all have three legs. Leave the poor creature alone.” 

She watched it stumble around the brickwork and thought, absurdly, of a faraway ruin she’d seen at a photography exhibition in Bombay, years ago. The ruins of another civilisation collapsed upon itself, or eaten alive, somewhere near Bath or York or somewhere like that. Stone circles, moss-furred and showing faultlines from old floods. The gallery had been very cold, and a natural redhead had called the whole thing elegiac. 

What she called elegiac had a name, Nerdanel wanted to tell her. Had fathers who vanished into cells and sisters with acid-bright hands from dye vats and boys who sold lemons until they forgot how to read. And what had England learned from all its stone circles? The grammar of forgetting, perhaps. A kind of historical keep-away game. We’ll speak of spices, not salt. Textile, not rope. She didn’t tell the woman anything, however, because Nerdanel was never in the habit of wasting her breath. 

“Are you excited?” Feanor grinned, nudging her. His missing canine in what otherwise had been a perfect set of teeth in a perfect face, carefully maintained for the way it let him whistle louder and more effortlessly than most. “For the big reunion, beloved? You and I, together at last after… oh, almost two years. You must be shitting yourself in glee.” 

“Such a way with words you have. I am sometimes certain Maglor is not your blood, though the eldest one absolutely is,” Nerdanel informed him, turning away in mock disgust, before offering him a hollow-cheeked smile. “But yes. Of course I’m looking forward to it.” 

And then she glared at him more fiercely than she ever had, eyes brimming over. “And I’ll give you hell, as I’ve sworn to for the past two years. Hell, beloved. I will never forgive you.” 

“Eh?” her husband recoiled, blinking in confusion. “What is this? Is it about… about the protest? I thought you reconciled… I thought you understood, Nerdanel.” 

“Setting yourself on fire wasn’t the unforgivable part, Feanor,” she snapped at him. “But taking my firstborn. My baby. You took him there and made him watch.” 

Feanor sighed. “My… he had to understand. He had to, so he would carry it forward.” 

“Carry what?”

“The flame. So he would carry the flame forward,” he leaned forward, grasping her fragile fingers. “And just look. Didn’t you hear Maglor yesterday? Self-rule soon, then certainly, in ten years or so—Independence. These sisterfuckers will leave, Nerdanel, these bastards who ate our children.” 

“Not all our children,” she turned away coldly. “One of them bears your teethmarks too.” 

“Are you saying it won’t be worth it?” Feanor’s wrath, almost in the flesh and for once directed to her. “That this country, my country, our country, will not be worth it when it arrives?” 

“Did I say that? You have never put words in my mouth. Don’t you dare begin now.” 

“Then why do you weep so!?” 

“I weep only for the ransom we must pay for that little moment of victory,” Nerdanel swayed a little where she sat. “There was no country here to kidnap, there were only people. No country will pay this ransom, it will be levied upon the children. My children, our children!” 

“What ransom, Nerdanel?” he threw his hands up, laughing hysterically. Bounced up from the floor, walked around the station like a beautiful madman. “What ransom? What haven’t we already paid? What is there?” 

“The cost only increases year by year, Feanor. With every deed that causes someone to despair, no matter how desperate the doer is themselves.” 

“What cost? What cost can there ever be, after this!?” 

“Do you think the decades ahead are not waiting in ambush?” she asked him. “That there will be no cruelty, that you holding the first child I held in my arms to the fire will not be the sound that rings through his life? No matter what country it happens in! My babies are the cost, Fëanor. Our babies. And theirs. And theirs. And theirs. Window after window of shuttered stories, infant after infant who could have outlived us all. There will be no riches. Only ashes to scrabble in and bones for poets to pick.”

Fëanor didn’t move, because in all the holy books, people stood silent at the moment of prophecy. Still, it was clear that something inside him had been pulled loose, unhooked. Like all his weight had shifted inward, like a building after fire—still standing, though hollowed. Don’t say that, he thought loudly in her head. Don’t say such things.

Hunger and revolution had diverged long ago in him, gone wandering like twins in a fable. And now, standing in the dull roar of the station, Nerdanel knew he understood: one would return and remain. The other would be lost to the wind. And then Fëanor, with a last, beseeching look at her, disappeared. 

And so, Nerdanel waited alone.

One thing however, was granted to her, and that was her gossipy little desire to see the new Viceroy’s contingent turn up at the station, flaking cruelty, marching up the stairs. By the time they turned up at last, she didn’t have the energy to draw a caricature, but she did so with her mind, noted the crumbs in beards and sweat-stained silks, and found them just as amusing as she would have in a drawing. All except a woman at the end of the group that nobody was speaking to, one of the officials’ wives judging by her attire. She was clearly very new to the country, looking at her pallor and the vacant expression of someone moving through life in a constant state of mild heatstroke. A slip of a thing, young and slender, aside from a pronounced belly announcing her every move. Dripping with diamonds and ponderously pregnant. 

കുഞ്ഞ് തന്നെയോ, അതോ കാലം പാഞ്ഞതോ?

വയറ്റു മുമ്പ്, പ്രായം പിന്നിലായതോ?

Is your baby in a rush or was it you that time passed?

The belly runs ahead, but the mother lags last.

Nerdanel couldn’t take her eyes off her—this veritable child-bride—a lonely girl lost in womanhood, trailing listlessly behind her bright-eyed, golden-haired husband. She’d paused for a moment to refill her water from the spigot near the entrance, swaying slightly where she stood. She was, the mother noted, outrageously pregnant. Twins, certainly. In such circumstances, coincidence was the form meaning was forced to take.

“Double?” Nerdanel asked quietly in English, translating directly from the Malayalam word for twins. “Your baby is double?” 

The woman, like most in her position, did not meet Nerdanel’s eye. Still she responded, as if glad to be spoken to at all. “Double? Oh, twins. It is, yes, I’m almost certain. I’m only six months along, and I’m already so big.”

“Doubles are best,” the former mother of twins smiled up at her. “Very naughty but. Especially if boy. Full time you will be running, must chase… double.” 

The Englishwoman laughed self-consciously, though she still didn’t meet Nerdanel’s eye. “Oh dear, I’ll have my work cut out for me. I can’t wait.”

“You are having sickness? Like vomiting? Your face looking tired.”

“All the time. Not just in the morning, but all the time. It should have stopped by now, Eärendil’s mother said, but of course, I can’t exactly ask her very much… postal service as it is, I’d probably have given birth by the time I get her response. And I don’t have a mother myself, see. My parents died young,” the woman flushed bright red, suddenly remembering who she was talking to, but even that drained out of her wan face. “Sorry. Urgh, I keep babbling. Sorry, I don’t think you care. Forget it.” 

“You try ayurvedic. Fennel and anaise tea. Warm milk and cardamom. Ginger tea with honey,” Nerdanel rattled off, shaking her head at the girl’s pallor. “Am mother also. Seven I bore. Doubles was worst for sickness. Trust, will work.”

The official’s wife blinked. “What… all at once?” 

“They not having schools where you come from?” Nerdanel asked, finally having reached a position in her life where being this rude to someone in the Viceroy’s contingent was not only not-terrifying, but excitingly possible. Although with this girl in particular, it did feel a little like pulling the wings off the wrong wasp. Her voice softened as the Englishwoman flushed again, biting a nail. “Of course not all once. Try them different day. See which best, then you keep take that. And Allah mian, silly child, don’t drink water from outside tap like this. Like you are begging for triple typhoid visiting you and these two.”

“Oh, I forgot, I keep forgetting,” the girl exclaimed, exasperated with herself. She wrenched the flask out of her bag, poured its contents out at her feet. Nerdanel looked at the water sinking into the ground for a long moment, before raising her eyes to the woman again. She sighed, feeling the hardness of a few seconds ago trickle back out of her at the sight of her trying to hold her stomach up out of the way with her hands, as if to reduce the pressure it was putting on her skinny figure. 

“Very nice bracelet you are wearing, Madam,” Nerdanel tried to distract her, catching sight of the trinket shining on her arm. “Handcarved?” 

“Oh, thank you. I had a birthday last week,” she’d blushed then, giggling yet looking all the unhappier for it. She stretched out her wrist on which glimmered a delicate chain. “I’d been looking forward to it for weeks. I love birthdays, I always have. My uncle used to get me dolls for each one, from China if you can believe! And my husband, he bought me this. It’s ever so pretty, don’t you agree? Look, it has a little albatross threaded through the middle, a diamond in her eye.”

“Many happy returns. Very nice designings,” Nerdanel peered at it. “Much stylish than my husband make. His jewelry is big bulky gold, so thick, see like big plates. Like I am going for war not market.” 

She considered the awkward girl again, the swathes of silk covering her protruding belly. Looking forward to her birthday for weeks, she said. I love birthdays. Dolls. Nerdanel closed her eyes. “How old you are?”

“Nineteen,” said the girl, making to follow her husband. “I just turned nineteen.”

The children of Empire too, then. Not just in the satellites but in London, in the metropole itself, the internal organs they would curl inwards and eat once India was taken from them. Dogs, Fëanor had said. An Empire run by dogs.

History, Nerdanel knew, was too easily seduced by the clean line, the noble gesture. But the truth lay in the smudge. The overexposure, the unframed and the cut-out-of-frames. Neither equal nor untouched by the other. The Viceroy’s secretary’s ponderously pregnant girl-wife. The hunger-striker pared down to breath and bone, unspooling across the stairs. Nerdanel’s final roll of film. Yes—why shouldn’t the loss of your children undo you completely? A train whistled. 

“The cost of it,” she murmured again, drawing her scarf tighter and resting her head on the pillar. “Oh Fëanor, the cost of it all.” 

An Interlude

What is Empire if not a long incision, and what is Arwen Undomiel if not a tiny, distant symptom of lingering infection? We deal here with pointless symbol after pointless symbol, date after date put into a jar and shaken. In 1980, three years after this story, the nation would vote the dictatorial Indira Gandhi back into power with a resounding majority. In 1984, she would be shot dead by her bodyguard. For weeks on end, much of the national populace took it upon themselves to conduct a vicious pogrom of lynching and murder against the Sikh community, to which said bodyguard had belonged, causing many Sikh men to cut off their long hair and unwind their turbans, going against the directives of their faith. Indira’s son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi refused to call for an end to the violence until he personally saw fit to do such a thing. 

When Maedhros Feanorian was only a toddler, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (you may be noticing somewhat of a pattern here) wrote to his little girl, telling her to “think of the world as a whole, and other people in it as our brothers and sisters”. On the 15th of August 1947, when Maedhros Feanorian’s son Elrond Peredhel was thirteen years old, Prime Minister Nehru spoke at midnight on the radio, marking the moment power was transferred from the British crown to the newly formed government of India. 

Long years ago, he said, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

Unfortunately, Elrond didn’t hear very much of the independence speech. The radio reception at the cliff-house, so close to the sea, had always been patchy at best and nonexistent at worst. Curufin used to say that was why the Fëanorians had always been incessantly rebellious: you couldn’t live your lives based on the whims of governmental broadcasts if you couldn’t hear them in the first place. But yes, when Elrond was thirteen and India was freed, he didn’t get to listen to the broadcast properly because the signal had given out and Tryst with Destiny turned into a primordial, unearthly SCREECH, and then nothing at all. 

It was only years later, when studying for his 10th standard exams, that Elrond actually listened to the speech in full, beyond the scraps of it Maglor and Maedhros would use when scolding them (“Elros, you lazy fucker, at the stroke of the noon hour, when the world is awake, you have the audacity to lie in bed?” or “long years ago my brother Maedhros made a tryst with destiny but if the hotheaded asshole had asked me I’d have told him to leave you both there only, such a mess you have made of my study”) 

Like being in the mouth of the gods, it had felt to Elrond, listening to it for the first time. Prophecy and fable, bringing you closer to divinity, like you knew them. Their quarrels, lusts, moods. Their wrath turned personal, and their favour became yours. They could be coaxed. You knew where you stood with a god—beneath them, yes, but seen. Somewhere along the line, they turned into statues and ceased to be answerable. I am not saying that Nehru had not sacrificed anything. I am only saying that the sacrifices made by Nehru and Gandhi, by the Prime Ministers and diplomats, took a different form to the sacrifices made by Feanor and Nerdanel. That some people sacrificed for their children, whilst others were made to sacrifice theirs.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely. How casually Nehru can refer to a moment. As if it exists apart from time itself, as pointlessly beautiful as a sunlit star. 

In 2015, an angry mob in Uttar Pradesh would enter the home of Mohammed Akhlaq, young enough to be a new grandfather. They would force their way in after a local youth used the temple broadcasting system to put out a message that Mohammad Akhlaq had slaughtered a cow and eaten beef on Eid. Cows were sacred to the dominant religion, which is to say that one could lynch a grandfather from the minority religion on suspicion of eating beef. And lynch him they would. 

The lawful government would take into account the actions of the lawless mob, who dragged a man from his house and murdered him before his octogenarian mother. They would not turn a blind eye to such violence—of course they wouldn’t. They would instead open up the fridge in Akhlaq’s kitchen and take the meat in for testing. The lawmakers would then charge the deceased with possession of what might or might not have been beef, for the purposes of what might or might not have been consumption. 

I am not arranging these shaken dates into an orderly line, or gesturing to any inevitability. This is not a defeatist story, and its writer is no pessimist. I am only saying that it should by now, to the reader, come as no surprise that a nation whose first utterance was a futile metaphor ended up developing a congenital predisposition for symbol over substance. Mahatma Gandhi, the spinner at the wheel. Mother India. The tryst with destiny. The tricoloured flag. The marbled dome. The last white ship.  The burning trains. The monstrous mother. The suffocated son. The unravelled turban. The nuclear test. The torn-down mosque. The dance upon its grave. The choking dam. The opened fridge. 

Chapter Text

The package arrives at six in the morning, because nothing that enters the cliff-house does so in a normal manner. 

“I need you to get this into the house without Maedhros-ikka seeing,” Celegorm yells out to Maglor, by way of a good-morning. “He’s out on his morning run with Cello, so you have an hour. You might have to carry it lengthwise. Maybe lay it on the floor. Call down Elrond to help you. And please remember that if the beloved family patriarch finds out, you are an accessory to this crime and will burn along with me when he sets the house on fire.” 

“Excuse me, I’m not an accessory to anything,” Maglor comes running out of the kitchen to the front porch. “What the fuck is that, and which demon from the depths of hell told you that you could bring it under this roof?” 

“What it is, Maglor-ikka, is twenty feet tall,” Celegorm strains under the weight of the package, and turns to the delivery boy. “Charge it to the Party, under Mohammed Razul’s campaign spend. Oh and if you get there before him, you can help yourself to a bigger tip and not have your hand cut off for it. And for fuck’s sake, does it have to be this heavy? Help me carry it inside at least.”

“I’m not the one who ordered a twenty-foot package, asshole!” the boy shoots back. “Carrying it inside and all is not my job. You ask that kochamma standing there in her pink apron to do it.” 

“Scram, shitlord!” Maglor snaps his fingers at the boy, blood pressure rising at being called a ‘little aunty’ not even fifteen minutes after waking up. He turns back to Celegorm, groaning. “Celegorm, my least favourite asshole, what kind of devilry are you dragging into the house, why are you making your poor ikka pay for it, and why must you always do your nonsense before the sun has even risen? Like a bloody rat! What is this!? Dead body?” 

“Well,” Celegorm grimaces. “Er. Sort of, yes.”

Maglor strides over, ripping off the brown paper at one end of the large, flat package. He jumps back, horrified. 

“CELEGORM, HAVE YOU GONE MAD?”

Elrond stumbles out of the house as well, clearly just roused from his sleep, and peers around his father’s shoulder. He blinks, and then lets out a sound which even the most generous of observers would term a “shriek”.

“Calm down, you’re both acting like I’ve killed someone,” Celegorm frowns, hands on his hips. “Elrond, if your cousin wins the election, the first thing we’ll decree is that people who step out of the house in their underwear for any reason aside from said house literally burning down around them, will be taken to the river and shot.” 

“Sorry, you’ve just brought a twenty-foot cardboard cutout of my twin brother, my dead twin brother let me be clear, into the house and you’re now stood here preaching about me wearing trousers? Do you hear yourself?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t do that,” sighs Celegorm. “Our Elros did always have a penchant for walking around the house in his boxers at all hours of the day. Now, both of you shut up, you’re overreacting.” 

“Oh, you think I’m overreacting, do you?” Maglor starts laughing wildly. “Oho, then I wonder what you’ll say when ikka returns from his run in… hm, forty five minutes or so, sees this monstrosity lying on the porch, drags you out to Azchavattom bus stand, ties you to the banyan tree and starts beating you to death with his slipper like a bloody cockroach?!”

“There’s a worrying amount of violent thought put into your imagery there, Maglor-kochamma. So unbecoming for a man who enjoys wearing aprons. Such an active fantasy life is not healthy for the mind,” Curufin observes, coming over to peer at the cutout himself, yawning his approval. “Oh, good one, Celegorm, you were right when you said the printers in Cochin were the ones to get this sorted.”

“You’re involved?” Elrond turns to his other uncle. “You?”

Curufin shrugs. “I’m on vacation.”

“Oh brilliant,” Haleth pops out from behind the house, grinning, her waist-length hair wet from her bath. “It’s here! Looks great, Celegorm, I’m actually surprised you pulled it off.”

“Elrond, next time any of your uncles or Lady Naxal here starts acting all sad and wounded when somebody from town calls this place ‘the madhouse’, please remind them of the events of this morning,” Maglor groans, rubbing his face with both hands. “I will not be here to do it myself because I will be imprisoned for attempted murder.”

“Why?” Caranthir asks. “Are you saying you’re not a fan of little Elros here?”

“Yes, tiny baby Elros,” Curufin grins, bending over to pat the twenty-foot cutout’s foot-long curls. “Celegorm, where the fuck are you going to put this until the march? Maglor-ikka is right, once you-know-who gets a good look at this, he will beat at least one person to death with his bare hands, and I personally refuse to die before my wildlife photography gets published.”

“Hmmm. Right, I’m afraid it’ll have to go on the open terrace, it’s too big to get through the door and ikka is too nosy to not sniff around the house like a fucking bloodhound the minute he senses something is off,” Celegorm claps bossily, peering upwards at the roof. “Caranthir, Haleth, get a rope, go round either side of the house and help leverage it onto the terrace once Curufin gets it upright. Celebrimbor, get up there and guard it with your life. If it rains, I’ll cut your cock off.” 

“I’m starting to think Maedhros-uncle was right when he called you humanity’s third testicle,” Celebrimbor mutters, grabbing one end of the package to help his father hoist it upright. “You mmmm—make whoever that d-d-depressed fucker was who shot Gandhi look like a saint.” 

“Beloved nephew, you running around saying things like whoever that depressed fucker was who shot Gandhi while campaigning for a national parliamentary seat is exactly why I need to resort to such measures to ensure your win.”

Once the cutout has been safely hoisted to the roof and laid flat, Maglor heaves a sigh of relief that there would be no murders for breakfast and rounds back towards Celegorm. 

“You do know that if you use whatever that is on the campaign trail, ikka will find out and kill you, right? You’re only delaying the inevitable. If you want so badly to die, why don’t you just walk into the sea now and save me the stress?” 

“You’re not wrong, I suppose,” Celegorm sighs, leaning backwards onto a pillar, accepting a mug of tea from Elrond. “Though I will say, I’m currently heavily in ikka’s favour and frankly I’m quite disturbed by how nice he is to me. Like being licked by a crocodile, you know? Sure, it’s affectionate, but there’s always the risk of getting your head bitten off. So I’d not even be that opposed to it, if he actually finds out…”

Maedhros had, a few days ago, uncharacteristically heaped praise upon Celegorm for the disruption he had caused by filibustering one of Daddy Finarfin’s campaign meetings with an issue so comically ridiculous that the Comrade almost cried with sheer delight when he heard of it, bodily lifting Celegorm up and kissing him on both cheeks, much to the latter’s confusion and mild terror. Finrod had been in the middle of promising to allocate a higher percentage of state funds to the maintenance of Kozhikode Emergency Hospital if he were to be elected, when Celegorm had run up to the front of the town hall, pushing past the crowd, grabbed the loudspeaker off the startled man, and began reading aloud from a folder he’d brought along. 

“One hundred and twenty six cows, five hundred and thirteen cats, fifty nine buffalos, eighty nine oxen, four hundred and seventy six dogs,” he cried out. “Sixteen hundred hamsters, five hundred and sixty seven thousand fish, three to four thousand sewer rats!”

“Get that idiot off the podium before I throw him off the accursed cliff he lives on,” Finarfin commanded, but Celegorm refused to budge, dodging the security guards with the loudspeaker still pressed to his mouth. “Finrod, for fuck’s sake, grab the speaker off him! Celeborn, if you don’t catch him, I’ll castrate you myself! Now!” 

“Three hundred and eighty nine thousand, five hundred and sixty six bees, eight hundred and six thousand wasps, fifteen thousand mosquitos! Seventeen butterflies, seven hundred and sixty five thousand moths! One million spiders! Allah, ya Allah, have mercy, one million spiders!” Celegorm groaned in despair, the master filibusterer in his element, one hand raised in theatrical supplication.

 “These are the animals which have died in Kozhikode district in the past twelve months! And yet this Finrod of the Kerala Congress stands here trying to route funds into an existing hospital for men, with neither care or concern for these poor creatures! Where is the veterinary hospital, Finrod? Where do we take our ailing bees? What are we to do with our seasick goldfish? Am I to take my beetle with a sprained ankle all the way to Kannur Veterinary? Five hours by bus, three by train? Finrod of the Kerala Congress, do you hate the lesser beasts? Does your Lord Jesus not tell you to love every creature? Do you count the legs of all you love? What if tomorrow, your sister grew two more legs? Would she no longer deserve medical care? One million spiders! One million spiders!” 

“Celegorm, get the fuck out!” Celeborn, husband of Galadriel, as in Finrod’s aforementioned sister, vaulted over a chair, trying to get to the dissident. “I swear I’ll thrash you to hell and back!” 

“Comrade Celebrimbor of the Communists is a lover of all creatures, no matter how many legs they may have! He is committed to the opening of a veterinary hospital right here in Kozhikode, for all the birds and all the bees!” Celegorm had then looked right into the mediapersons cameras lining the room, now casting both hands in the air as he noted Daddy Finarfin himself striding up behind him. “Finarfin, sir! Where are the spiders? What have you done with the spiders? One million! One million spiders—have you no pity? People of Kozhikode, is this the man whose son you wish to elect? This brute who pulls the legs off spiders and watches them suffer with no care for their hurts, let alone veterinarian provision? Daddy Finarfin of Kerala Congress, O eater of arachnids! One million spiders, my dear children of Kozhikode, one million spiders!” 

Finarfin had justifiably given Celegorm an outstanding black-eye, bruised solar plexus and cracked rib for his efforts, but even that didn’t make up for the knowledge he now carried within him. The knowledge of just how hard and for how long Maedhros would cackle when he heard about the incident. 

And Daddy Finarfin also knew just how swiftly the news would rip through town, catalysed by said Comrade’s habit of proselytising to everyone he met, to the point the local elderly-lady population took to drawing straws to determine who was fated to sit silently beside him on the bus on the days Fingon borrowed his motorbike. Not because he was a particularly offensive seatmate, but because at some point in the journey Maedhros would inevitably turn across to them, physically incapable of keeping his mouth shut for longer than ten minutes, and make some polite inquiry like, “you know how many spiders have died in Kozhikode this year under Kerala Congress rule, sahiba? Under spiderfucker Finarfin’s care? One million. One million spiders, can you believe it?” before respectfully bowing his head and murmuring a prayer for the dead. 

That had in fact been precisely how Maedhros spent most of his time across the last week, so cheered up by the incident that he kept reverently muttering “what have you done with the spiders?” at random moments throughout the day. He’d even twirled Fingon around the house when he delivered the daily local paper’s coverage of the Kerala Congress campaign meeting, the front page reading: ONE MILLION SPIDERS. As such, Celegorm was unprecedentedly in his brother’s good books at the moment, as uncomfortable as such a position was. 

“Whatever your justification, Celegorm, I refuse to be a witness,” in the present, Maglor raises his own hands, not in supplication but surrender. “You want to die, be my guest. But I will not watch.”

“You’re not needed to watch, brother dear, you’re going to be directly involved. We’re going on a second round today, ikka won’t be there, he’ll be out in Kannur most of the day for a regional Party meeting and will get back late. We can’t have him at this event for a number of reasons, and we need a singer.”

“Eh? No Maedhros? And what singer?” Maglor frowns. “Don’t your marches normally involve scimitars imported from god-knows-where, ikka balancing on top of a lorry or bus or some other monstrosity with the Party flag and a fish-knife roaring slogans while the rest of you idiots follow on foot chanting that ridiculous “our beloved valiant Comrade, the breaker of bones, he has wildfire in his heart” song like you’re spectators at a dogfight and not campaigners in a local election? Don’t you people set fire to one or two buses at the very least? I am absolutely not coming to that. And not in a million years will I sing at it, I have some class, Celegorm, even if the concept has bypassed you entirely. Get that revolutionary band you always invite, why are you disturbing me?” 

“This one has to be you,” Celegorm crosses his arms firmly. “I give no fucks as to your opinion. You will be there.”

“I absolutely will not!” Maglor shouts back. “Celegorm, I told you when I took on the twins, I wouldn’t get involved in any of this again. For their sake as much as mine. I refuse to come and join you in setting fire to half the town and heckling Finarfin’s guys as they set fire to the other half. That is no longer my life, I’m sorry.”

“How many times do I have to say it, Maglor? It needs to be you. It’s not what you think, I promise you this. We’ve already had the campaign rally with the trucks and lorries and all that, I swear. This is nothing like that, and there’s no violence involved. In fact, Finarfin and his people won’t touch us at all.” 

“He’s right that they’ve finished up with the big one, actually. If you mean the night rally, they did that one a couple evenings ago, and Finarfin’s people had theirs last night. I took Cel along to ours because she wanted to watch,” Elrond calls out from the outdoor sink, muffled around the toothbrush in his mouth. “Abba, you couldn’t guess what he stood on this time.” 

Neither could Celebrían. 

Elrond had, after hours of her pleading, agreed to take her along to watch the biggest campaign march of the election, the night rally. He had rented out a terraced room overlooking the wide, paved Mavoor Road where they could watch the bulk of the procession from a safe distance, Celegorm having told him they would almost definitely pause there for sloganeering. 

“I don’t understand why you’re going to such extremes, Elrond,” Celebrian leaned on the railing, crossing her arms. “And I feel like you’re being rather overprotective, I’ve gone out to places with far more conflict for work. And this is your side, isn’t it? Why do we need to stay up here?” 

“Yes, you have gone to worse places, but that was with a big shiny bulletproof vest reading PRESS, and you don’t have that here,” Elrond said defiantly. “And it doesn’t matter whether its our guys or theirs, they’re not very different from each other and violence is the entire point of these night-time rallies. It’s not if it breaks out, but when, and I refuse to have you in the middle of that, I’m sorry. Hell, we were forbidden to go to these till we were what, fifteen? By Baba himself, not Abba, who normally was the one who banned us from things… which speaks to how serious they both were about it. Believe me, when you see them coming, you’ll be glad you’re here and not there.” 

“Right. But what I don’t understand though,” she craned her neck, hearing faint drumming from the distance and trying to place its location. “Is why your father is the one heading up these marches if he’s not actually running for MP? Surely the people want to hear from the actual candidate, don’t they?” 

“Yes, and they do hear from them in every other campaign event, just not the night rally. Watching Celebrimbor, or hell, even Elros, standing on a bus making a manifesto speech would be like watching a Parliamentary broadcast, see? Paint drying. Nobody wants to actually see that, at least, nobody’s going to care if they parade it around town,” Elrond explained. “The night rally isn’t run by the MP candidate, it’s run by the Party workers—as in, people like Baba and Celegorm, who are directly on the Party’s payroll. Good MPs don’t tend to make good Party workers here… a politician shouldn’t exactly feel at home in a violent public spectacle, which is all these marches are, on both our end and Finarfin’s Kerala Congress’ end. It’s all about image for this one. How frightening and memorable you look, how much fear you strike. It’s not exactly the Oxfordshire parish council elections, these rallies are nothing more than a show of strength.” 

“I take the point, but how spectacular could a campaign march actually be?” Celebrían asked, but her question was swiftly answered by the march itself, announcing their presence with increasingly louder drumming. She could hear someone speaking into a microphone, and leaned over the railing as the sea of red came into view. “Oh. Oh. Elrond. Elrond, look.” 

“What the…” Elrond looked up as the procession rounded the corner, his air of learned superiority disappearing in a matter of seconds, eyes widening. “Fuck me.” 

“Is that an elephant?” Celebrían shrieked, laughing hysterically, hands over her mouth. “Elrond, oh god, that’s a fucking elephant!” 

“No. No fucking way. This is… unhinged even for Baba,” Elrond choked through tears of laughter. “This is… oh my fucking god. He’s insane. Celegorm looks like he’s having the time of his life! I bet it was his idea, oh fuck me. They’re all insane, Cel. Oh, good, looks like they’re pausing here—they’ll do a call-and-response, just watch. A fucking elephant.”

There was indeed an elephant in the procession. And what an elephant it was: clearly borrowed from one of the nearby temples judging by its unbothered attitude to the chaos, someone had draped an enormous Party flag across its back instead of the usual glittering over-sheet temple elephants usually wore in religious processions, a titanic hammer-and-sickle emblazoned on its flanks. Elephants were a cornerstone of Kerala’s cultural events, primarily attached to temple processions, festivals and weddings, as well as being domesticated for the agrarian industries, so an elephant heading up a Hindu festival parade was a perfectly normal sight. However, utilising one in a political campaign march was extremely out of the ordinary for the time, even in Kerala and even for the Communist Party of India, who were notorious for their dedication to spectacle. And it clearly was an inspired idea, going by the crowds lining the street and cheering the convoy on.  

“Finarfin’s going to go wild over this one,” grinned Elrond, shouting over the deafening drumbeats. “Only Baba and Celegorm would think of getting in a fucking elephant. I wonder where they even got the damn thing from!” 

The creature placidly followed the car convoy, led by a large, open-topped lorry  outfitted with speakers and a raised platform upon which Celebrimbor sat just as calmly with a loudspeaker, confidently stammering out manifesto points in between the drumming and chanting of the Party men around him. Celegorm was leading the men on foot, all armed with either flaming torches, clubs or knives (“don’t worry,” Elrond reassured Celebrían. “The other side have those too.”), occasionally lifting a hand to point out structures specifically planted to be knocked down. Elrond and Celebrían watched as he neatly collared a youth worker from the opposition who attempted to heckle Celebrimbor’s stutter, backhanded him, kneed him in the abdomen, and tossed him aside. The elephant blinked sleepily as the drumming increased, ambling along as though such events were commonplace in its life. 

And atop the elephant stood Maedhros, balancing effortlessly on the broad back, barefoot, a Party flag draped loosely over his shoulders and a flaming torch in his raised fist. He was shirtless, only wearing a crimson mundu folded up to the knee, and every time the flag on his back rose in the wind, the firelight illuminated the tapestry of sword-cut scars on his torso. The flames lit up his hair, buffeting dangerously around his shoulders like spreading wildfire, and his green-eyes shone in the night, the kohl around his eyes drawn on darker than normal. 

“INQUILAB ZINDABAD!” he roared as the convoy paused, raising his flaming torch higher as the crowd repeated it. Long live the revolution! 

“O children of Kerala, hear us now! To take on a she-devil, you need a he-devil!” Celegorm had joined Celebrimbor on the lorry podium. “Kozhikode’s very own Comrade Maedhros, the bonebreaker!” 

“THE BONEBREAKER!” chanted the Party men, as Celegorm marched around the lorry, first reciting a short list of Celebrimbor’s manifesto pledges before swivelling back to his brother on elephant-back. “What is this election but an opportunity to reset this nation after a decade of this dictator? And yet we have all been children once, we have all broken bones. And to set them right again, some bones must be broken twice. And so, who better than the stalwart Comrade on the frontlines? Who better to guard our Celebrimbor as he puts his pledges into action? Who better to break the very bones of this nation so our promising youth can set it all to rights?” 

Maedhros began snarling out slogan after slogan, pausing to hear the crowd’s responding cry, the flames dancing off his white teeth and casting the rest of him into darkness, so that at certain points he looked like a disembodied, floating scrap of fire. As always it was in total darkness that he looked his brightest. Looked ancient, beautiful, divine, powerful—and utterly terrifying.

And sad, thought Elrond all of a sudden, feeling an unexpected lump in his throat as he watched his father atop the elephant. There’s something ever so sad in it now.

A glance at Cel’s stricken face told him she felt the same. 

“Cel? Cel, what’s wrong?” 

“Why are they parading him around like that?” she lowered her camera, gazing at the sight before them as if it were a funeral procession. “Is this… is this how it always is?”

“At these rallies? Well, the elephant is a new touch, but otherwise, yes,” Elrond sighed, pressing his lips together tightly. “Yes. The parading, the violence, the sloganeering. I told you, it isn’t pretty.” 

She didn’t take her eyes off Maedhros. “It’s not that. It’s not the violence. It’s just… does he always dress like that? All the eyeliner as well.”

Elrond shook his head, turning away slightly from the crowds. “No. Not at normal rallies or events, not even on his rounds, and he’s actually beating people in those so you’d think it would be more appropriate there. But no, he’s always… it’s just for this one. For the spectacle. Though now that I’m seeing it again… there’s some discomfort to it all, isn’t there? I don’t know why I feel itchy, Cel, but you’re right. I do.” 

Being a photojournalist and Maedhros not being her father, Celebrían had in fact read even deeper into the image than Elrond—who would not have thought of his father in such a way—and so could easily name the discomfiting undercurrent to the procession. She understood the idea that it was a spectacle of power and strength, that Maedhros looked animalistic and fearsome, even noble in a way. The divine right of revolutionaries. But what she noticed and Elrond understandably didn’t, was the nauseating sensuality of the figure he cut, standing on the beast. When she first caught sight of him through the viewfinder she’d been looking through, her keen journalist-eye had focused on it immediately, much to her own disgust. 

Men walking around without a shirt on was a common sight in hot countries: that summer, all of the Fëanorian brothers and Elrond himself walked around the house half-clad, wearing only a lungi, or breechcloth, tied loosely around their waists. It had been a practice she envied every time she had to change her shirt in the middle of the day, having sweated through it in a matter of hours. Elros, being Elros, had not only taken it another step further but also exported it, walking around the house in his underpants in both Kerala and England. Elwing’s face when he walked into Christmas dinner one year dressed only in bright blue boxers with Popeye the Sailor Man emblazoned on his arse was a sight Celebrían hoped she would never forget. So yes, she knew such attire was not inherently sexual, not at all. 

However, that specific night had been cool, so there was no reason for her father in law to appear bare-chested like that. She’d seen other marches go past in the weeks she’d spent here, many led by Maedhros, and the marchers including himself had always, like Elrond had confirmed, been fully clothed—appearing at a campaign rally half-clad was neither commonplace nor particularly appropriate, not for a Party leader, and especially not for a regional branch president or a man of his age. And so, Celebrían surmised, this wasn’t a candid photograph, it was a concept shoot. 

It was not the traditionalist, aggressively patriarchal masculinity that Maedhros (and Daddy Finarfin, and many of that ilk) subscribed to in his day-to-day, it was not a show of strength like knocking an opponent down in the street. No, this was a carefully curated collision, leveraging both the terror and sex appeal the man seemed to evoke in both his admirers and detractors, an image curated for prime effectiveness based on the erotic fantasies people all over the world had about men like Maedhros. 

“INQUILAB ZINDABAD!” roared Maedhros again, waving to the crowd to repeat after him. The torch held even higher, hair loose around his shoulders, starting to curl in the heat. Sweat raced down his torso from how close he stood to the flames, tracing past his ridged abdomen and disappearing past the low-slung mundu around his hips. Her daughter’s grandfather, the spectacle. Celebrían shut her eyes tightly, willing the image to disappear and her stomach to settle.

Oh, my Arwen. Was this how they all looked at you?

“I never thought of it as sad,” murmured Elrond, his eyes still fixed on Maedhros. “Not when… he never used to let us come to these. Ordinary marches, campaign rounds, speeches, yes. Hell, when Elros joined the Youth Cadre, he took him around to watch him beat people up. He never minded us seeing the violence, honestly he found it funny. But never these night rallies. We’d only see the photographs. And I’m starting to see why he didn’t want us there.” 

Gazing at the firelight glancing off his father’s clenched fist held high in the air, Elrond came to the realisation that it was not only American Linda at the ratheeb whose gaze could cut skin. That even in Kozhikode, men like Maedhros were feared without evidence, revered as an image and loved only with proof. That even in his own home, he lived as both subject and exhibit, every action measured for another’s gaze. 

For a wild moment, Elrond wanted to laugh and scream at once, imagining the idea of this crowd standing around the cliff-house witnessing his father on the porch platform at night, rocking his scared son and telling him stories. Perhaps they would riot. Perhaps mass chaos would break out. Because everything they’d been taught to fear was suddenly standing before them, articulating his undeniable humanity. There would be no hatred in their gaze, he was certain. Not here at least. There would only be the startled, guilt-ridden reverence reserved for the disfigured and the cosmic, like they were staring at a solar eclipse on elephant-back. Propriety would still their hands but the impulse would remain: a desire to prod at the seams of his father’s skin for proof it held together like theirs. 

Here too, Baba? 

Back at the cliff-house porch, Maglor continues attempting to worm his way out of Celegorm’s insistence that he attend the day’s campaign event, finally landing on the fact that Elladan was sick, would need extra attention and thus he wouldn’t be able to leave the house. 

“Maglor. Maglor, shut the fuck up, he has the flu, not tuberculosis. Oi, Tweedledum-sir,” Celegorm snaps his fingers at Elladan, who was as usual eavesdropping on the stairs, his brother right behind him. “Get out here! Will you die today if your achachan goes out?” 

Elladan considers it, sniffing. “What will you give me for not-dying?” 

“And me,” Elrohir pipes up. “Or else I’ll kill him.” 

“Yes, he will. He’s very good at killing.” 

“Thanks, Elladan. You too.”

“I know. That’s why we’re twins.” 

“Allah mian. Fine. I’ll put aside the plan I had of drowning you, no, both of you in the temple pond tonight as my equivalent of your Maedhros-uncle’s morning run,” Celegorm smiles sweetly at them, before turning back to Maglor. “Wonderful creatures you’re raising right there, ikka, I can see exactly why you don’t want to leave them even for a second.” 

“You make a good point,” sighs Maglor. “Boys. Scram before I drown you in the temple pond. Ten seconds, bath, upstairs, take Elrond with you to supervise, and let me know if he takes his eyes off you for half a second so I can put them out. Now!” 

“Maglor, it’s about Elros,” Celegorm says urgently, after making sure Elrond had shut the door behind them. “It’s the first proper election since… I swear to you, it is not violence. Finarfin’s men are in on it too, they’re clearing the route as we speak. We need you there. You, not ikka. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Just come along on this march, and play a few songs at the end. Whatever you want.”

Maglor pinches the bridge of his nose, rubs his temples. “What do you mean it’s about Elros? Listen. I’m not joking. Ikka is up to his neck in stress right now, and you pulling some kind of campaign stunt using the boy’s name… I’m being serious. He’ll blow his top. You know his control has been… it’s not at its best lately. That incident with the petrol bomb was this week, in case you forgot.” 

He was referring to three nights ago, when someone belonging to one of the religious fundamentalist groups that had coalesced in the absence of a proper national party, had thrown a petrol-rag in a bottle through the front window of the cliff-house. Maglor had swiftly retrieved it and removed the rag, having been used to doing such things for decades, and Celegorm had rushed out to let out the Dobermanns and apprehend the culprit. It had all been relatively commonplace for being this close to the election, they’d been going through the motions half-asleep, until Maedhros stormed out of the house, pushed Celegorm aside and beat the bottle-thrower within an inch of his life. 

“You bastard, there are children in this house! Step foot in here again, cross the fucking gate, the fucking threshold again, and I’ll break every fucking bone in your legs!” he picked him up bodily, slammed him against the outer wall of the house. “There are women and children in this house! And you know that, don’t you! How fucking dare you!” 

It had taken both Caranthir and Celegorm to drag him away for long enough that the man could stumble out of the courtyard, bleeding all over the place. 

“Have you gone insane, ikka?” Celegorm yelled. “It’s just a fucking petrol bomb, our guys throw a dozen a night! I’d have duffed him up as he deserved, you didn’t have to half-kill the bastard!”

“Fuck,” Maedhros spat out a mouthful of blood, panting. “Right. Right, you’re right. I lost it.”

“No shit, you lost it,” Fingon strode out, pale with rage, shoving Maedhros in the chest at every sentence. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Finnu, get the hell off me! Go back inside and stop causing a scene!” Maedhros stepped backwards, bristling as though he hadn’t personally spent the last ten minutes waking up half the neighbourhood with his hollering and by all intents and purposes, causing a scene. “How many times do I have to tell you to not bloody interfere with me in public, eh?”

Fingon hears nothing. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that! You forget yourself! What is wrong with you? Hm? What the fuck is wrong with you? You go too far and kill someone or come close and one of these bastards files a case, then it’s over, Russo! With your charges, you’ll fucking hang for it! What is wrong with you? They’ll hang you for it!”

Maedhros, adrenaline still coursing through him, had smirked, touched his forehead reverently and said “inshallah”. God-willing, if only. And whatever Fingon had or hadn’t seen in his partner’s eyes at that moment caused him to rush back into the house, cross the inner courtyard, slam their bedroom door and draw the large deadbolt from inside. 

“Ah, shit, fucking hell… listen, sorry, Finnu, wait — open the door, I’m sorry!“ Maedhros came back to himself then, ran up after him, knocking on the door and apologising, but Fingon hadn’t relented until the next afternoon, leaving him to sleep on the couch in his study that night. 

Maglor hadn’t thought too much of it at the time: the cliff house currently hosted eleven people and two dogs, and when the house was that full of people with such ridiculous personalities, every day played host to some melodrama or the other. That had always been the case, even before everything, even when they were all children. And his brother had always been a rather difficult person to live with, so Russo-and-Finnu tended to be rather volatile as a rule and yelling (from Maedhros) and days-long silent-treatments (from Fingon) weren’t uncommon, especially this close to elections when tempers were running high. 

Hell, he’d even chuckled, watching Maedhros pummel on the bedroom door, yelling out apologies. At the idea that after all they had lived through and couldn’t live through, after everything, love still dressed itself up in new clothes every so often and his terrorist of a brother could still grovel at its feet for a crumb. God help this idiot, he remembers thinking, indulgently shaking his head as he mopped up the last bits of petrol from the floor, before recoiling from himself in horror. 

“I know, Maglor,” Celegorm taps his foot on the linoleum of the porch, testy. “I was the one who had to wrestle him down. That’s why I’m saying I’ve planned this for a day he isn’t in town. It’s been in the works for weeks and weeks. And…”

“And what, Celegorm?”

“You’re really looking me in the eye and telling me that I would use Elros’ name for a political stunt?” Celegorm’s face is hard, and behind the hardness, hurt. “Do you remember the night ikka returned from Kasaba? How could you say such a thing, Maglor?” 

Maglor closes his eyes, wincing. He sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Sorry. I know. I know you wouldn’t. I spoke wrongly.” 

“Will you come to this? You can play anything. It doesn’t have to be revolutionary. Doesn’t even have to be political. This is for Elros. Nothing more nor less. All right?” 

“Celegorm, if he finds out…” 

“I’ll take the blame. Entirely.”

Maglor steels himself. Nods. Doesn’t ask another thing. For Elros, he knows. Anything. 

Still, whatever form Maglor had imagined the march might take, it is certainly not this. 

“Ready?” Celegorm calls out, raising a hand outwards. “Lift!” 

Twenty men bend to the earth and lift the twenty-foot cutout of Elros up onto their shoulders, ten on each side. Maglor waits quietly next to Curufin for the moment they would hoist it vertically, but they don’t. Elros stays horizontal: wide-eyed, backlit, immortalised in cheap flex-print. His shoulders, cut from plywood, bob with each step. The men bear the cutout flat, arms locked under it like pallbearers. They bear no flags. There are no vehicles in the procession either—another oddity. Maglor’s eyes widen, spotting Finrod, and then out in the front, beside Celegorm, his father, Finarfin himself, walking as though he didn’t spend half an hour last week thrashing the man beside him. 

He looks at the way the cutout is carried. Ten on each side, shoulder high. Like at Christian funerals, he realises. He hurries forward, turns to Finarfin. 

“Your idea?” he asks quietly. 

The behemoth of a man nods. 

“For Elros?” Maglor asks, frowning. “Did you… like him very much?”

“No,” Finarfin grimaces. “He was a bit of a pompous prick. Sorry. Never liked the little shit. And personally, if I had asthma, I wouldn’t run around giving speeches in dust clouds, you know?”

“Then…” 

“If your brother, you know which one I mean, hears I organised this, well, it might unsettle him so much I’ll finally land the blow that kills him,” Finarfin closes his eyes blissfully, crossing himself. “Might do it if he comes after me for fucking with our spidery friend here last week. Mind you, that one has promised me I’ll get to be the one that tells your lovely brother that this has happened, and I intend to take up that offer.”

Maglor gives up on him and sidles over to Celegorm. 

“I told you it was just a vigil, didn’t I?” hisses the latter, shooting him a swift obscene hand gesture. “But obviously, you didn’t believe me. Dickhead.” 

“You said no such thing! Regardless, what would a vigil in support of Elros do?” Maglor asks, frowning. “I know it’s the first proper election since his death, yes, but we had several memorials the year he died, several events to remember him by. And the stunt with the pallbearers and the cutout is good, yes, but what is it meant to do other than break ikka’s heart if he finds out you did such a thing? Several memorials, Celegorm. And yet, nothing changed, it’s been over five years. How is this any different?” 

Celegorm shrugs, smiling slightly. “Because this isn’t a march to remember him by. It’s stage two. A reminder that we haven’t forgotten. And that we know. And about ikka, I never said I didn’t want him involved in this because he’d hate it. That was never the reason I didn’t want him here for this. Besides, this isn’t exactly a march in support of Elros either. Isn’t in support of anyone at all, really. You think Finarfin and his Gandhifuckers would be here if it was something for one of our guys?” 

“Eh? Then what?”

As the procession turns into Kallayi near the old mosque, police begin to line the roadside, frowning at the unauthorised march but unwilling to disturb what looked like a vigil, and uncertain as to what the point of the entire exercise was. The cutout sways, a plywood body in a sea, floating past the old port with the mural of old wooden ships from Mombasa. Maglor’s feet start to rub in his shoes. A blister starts to form. The plywood-pallbearers start wincing, carrying and carrying and carrying without end. He wonders if that is the point of the march, suffering-without-end, and asks Celegorm as such. 

“Of course it isn’t. Are you stupid? Haven’t you noticed the route we’re taking?” Celegorm asks him in turn, as if surprised that Maglor still hasn’t gotten it. “It’s not our usual one, you know. It doesn’t actually circle the town. We’re more than halfway through now, Maglor. Where do you think we’re going? Where did we start?”

“At Jail Road, wasn’t it?” and then Maglor releases a long, punched-out breath. “Oh, hell. Celegorm. Fucking hell.” 

Celegorm raises his eyebrows as if to say yes, obviously, fucking hell, not even teasing Maglor for the crudeness of his swearing. 

“Kasaba. Marad. Nadakavvu. Vellayil. Then Kasaba again,” he swallows hard. “No lorries, no bike convoys, no elephants. On foot. We know. Understand? That’s what this is. We know who, and where.”

“I see. I see it now. Fuck me, Celegorm.”

“You sound like ikka,” Curufin joins them, grinning. He slings an arm around Maglor’s shoulders. “Which I suppose is apt, for this particular event, eh?” 

All too soon, they’re walking down Jail Road again. Staring at Kasaba Station Compound, one corner of the earth darker than the rest from the flowers that had been ceaselessly dumped into it for days on end.

“Turn! Drop!” calls out Celegorm. 

The men shift their shoulders, dropping one side and lifting the other, and the cutout spins around, gazing at the earth. Then the pallbearers step away to the side. Elros slams into the soil, dust curling around his ears, his neck, his hands. There is no gentleness in it. Maglor watches, transfixed. 

A line of central-state policemen curl around the low, squat wall. It’s as quiet as the grave. Two doors away, there’s a newsagent. It strikes him, not for the first time, how easy it is to live beside the unthinkable. He’s learned how the mind edits, how the eye glances and then looks away. This is the real trick: the world doesn't hide its cruelties, it leaves them in plain view. 

Now, the cardboard cutout of Comrade Elros prone at their feet grows and grows, right before Maglor’s eyes. It grows thick and twisted, springing roots tangling in the dark, slowly pulling it down beneath the topsoil. Then, the roots stretch him out under the earth as if he lay on a medieval rack, unrelenting until he spans the length of Kozhikode, toes touching Kottakal and hopelessly unkempt hair brushing Koyilandi. Thirty one thousand footsteps drum across him on their way to work, to the shops, to school. And unaware of his sudden vastness, Elros begins to stir at the sound, tossing restlessly beneath the surface like a child under a blanket, his colossal, unseeing eyes pressed to the earth. 

There are speeches made, Finrod gesticulates and Celebrimbor stutters, but Maglor hears nothing of them until Curufin grasps his elbow, pushes him to the wide, flat bed of a truck where the sound system is laid out, thick wires snaking across the ground. Celegorm stands near it, holding up a loudspeaker. He’s looking intently at the station, grinning. Vicious, thinks Maglor. How vicious he looks. Do we all look so? He follows his gaze. Sees a curtain twitch shut. It’s remarkable how quickly the ordinary curdles under scrutiny, how what once felt procedural now looks precarious.

He has no clue what is going on, doesn’t want to know, but is glad he’s a part of it regardless. Celegorm helps him up onto the bed of the truck.

“Go for the throat, Maglor,” he says. “Go for the throat.” 

He does. 

When he used to perform at the rallies, decades ago when Elrond and Elros were little, he had an entire repertoire. Marching songs, revolutionary translations, adaptations of folk songs. Ballads and poetry and hell, sometimes even dramatised prose, acted out for the spectacle of it. He doesn’t do any of that here. He sits quietly in the truck-bed, crosses his legs beneath him, and sings six lines into the microphone. 

Six simple lines that everyone in the crowd knows by-heart. Most have heard them, and many have sung them. He knows that Menon, behind the twitched-shut curtain, would know the lines too, in some shape or form. There’s nothing to it. Neither metaphor nor literary value, and most of it is nonsense. There are some songs that lose their magic once analysed, once laid into ordinary and linear prose, and so Maglor prefers to keep their notes floating in the air. They can then condense upon every person who hears it, like breath on glass, make it impossible for them to avoid the commonality of it, and in turn making it impossible for them to avoid being in communion with the others hearing and knowing it as well. Celegorm turns to him with tears in his eyes, laughing as he mimes a throat being cut. 

“Uncle,” Celebrimbor says quietly, as they pack up after the march, loading speakers and boxes into Celegorm’s Jeep back to the Party office. “This—this—this was all you. It went better than I ever thought it might. And it was all you.”

“Oh, shut it. You know it was all of us,” Celegorm waves an airy hand. “Including bloody Bilbo, that little freak. And the pallbearer thing was Finarfin’s unfortunately fantastic idea, remember?”

“No, I don’t mean that,” Celebrimbor clarifies. “I mean the whole thing. All of it. This stage and the one b-b-b-before and… everything. Organising all of this, getting even Finrod’s guys on board and keeping them there. The plans we have for election night. It’s all you. You did this. Look what you’ve done. F—F—for our Elros, I mean. I told you, didn’t I?” 

Celegorm turns from the Jeep and looks up at his nephew. His eyes travel down his face slowly and land at the hollow of his throat, where sits a tiny, healed-over scar, and his face tenses with suppressed guilt. “I wish I could take it back. I will always wish I could take it back.”

“Forget that. I’m just here to gloat. I told you, didn’t I? That you c—c—could d——— could do so much more for him,” Celebrimbor smiles, gives him a thumbs-up. “See. T-t-this is why I’ll make such a great MP. I love being right.” 

Celegorm cannot help but laugh, though his eyes don’t leave the little white scar. 

Elros was killed in the month of Mithunam in the Malayalam calendar. Mithunam was always the worst month of the monsoon, the sea snarling against its limits and all the dead rivers brought back wrong, brought back ravenous, forgotten debris from the year before thrown up by the gutters. Pakistan had withdrawn from what is now Bangladesh. Indira Gandhi had been voted back into power. Richard Nixon was the President of the United States. And in the courtyard of a cliff-house in Kozhikode, Celegorm pressed a knife to the throat of his favourite brother’s son. 

Five years ago, on the night he circled the district’s police stations and came home empty-handed and humiliated, Maedhros had stumbled up to the threshold of the cliff-house and said nothing at all. Then he did a swift about-turn and crossed the garden again, retching violently into the bushes. Fingon had rushed forward to help, his soft voice murmuring it’s all right, get it out, it’s just me, get it out, then tell me, it’s just Finnu, slow and soothing until all of a sudden it wasn’t, and he’d turned around and gasped out a single, terrified word: urutti. Uruttal, in the simple-past tense. Elros and his bloody inhalers littering the house. 

Fingon had finally dragged Maedhros up, half-carrying him towards the house even though Maedhros was over half a foot taller than him. Maglor had intercepted them at the threshold, slapped his older brother so hard in the face he’d reeled from the blow, stumbling into Fingon, grabbing him by the collar shouting cruel things that were not untrue at all. And then Maglor had collapsed forward into Caranthir’s arms, Celegorm rushing over to support him and take him indoors. Curufin stood silently, pale and wide-eyed, as Fingon forced Maedhros down into his father’s old easy-chair, holding him tight, nearly sitting on his lap in the narrow seat. 

“Caranthir and Haleth are staying with Maglor, they’re in the sitting room upstairs. Don’t, ah, don’t go up there for a while. Finnu, don’t let him go up there,” Celegorm stepped back out onto the porch, rubbing his temples. He gestured forwards, to where Maedhros’ clenched fist trembled on the armrest. “Shit. Your hand, ikka. You’re bleeding. What… did you hit them?”

Maedhros gave no indication that he’d heard, having slipped into the fugue state he wouldn’t slip back out of until days later, when he would break down the door of the cliff-house for no reason at all. 

“Russo,” murmured Fingon, pulling Maedhros’ hair back from his ear. “He’s asking about your hand. Have you… has there been any fighting?” 

Maedhros shook his head slowly, still expressionless. “Hm? No. No. I was digging.”

“What?” frowned Curufin. “Digging what? What do you mean?” 

“They had me do a round of the stations,” Maedhros muttered. “Kasaba, Marad. Nadakavvu. Vellayil. Then Kasaba again. They asked me to search… to search the guttering. I knelt at their feet, of course I did. Of course I did. I searched again and again. Even the ditch.”

“They made you kneel?” Celegorm’s tone took on a dangerous air, his face twisting into an unfamiliar mask of wrath, a derangement far from his usual curated eccentricity. He looked wretched, utterly unhinged. “Ikka. They had you kneel at that bastard’s feet?” 

“Of course I knelt. Of course I… I’m his father. I’m his father. I begged him. Asked him… asked him, from a father to a father. He has a child, Menon does. I pleaded for hours. And I knelt. Of course I knelt.”

Celegorm said nothing more, slamming his way back into the house, Curufin at his heels. Fingon wanted to rise, follow them, either stop them from engaging in whatever suicidal retaliation they had planned or join them in it. Raised voices, the snick of steel, Celebrimbor stuttering, pleading with his father, Celegorm shoving someone aside, throwing things about. Fingon made to stand. But Maedhros’ chest began hitching with a sudden, crippling panic at the loss of contact, the initial shock having worn off by the admission that he’d knelt. He dug his nails into Fingon’s arms, both unable to breathe and not wanting to, and Fingon sat back down, rocking them both as Maedhros clung even tighter. 

“Finnu, I swear, I swear to you I knelt,” he choked out. “Don’t go. Don’t leave. I swear it, I swear it. I did kneel. I’m—“

“I know you did, hush. Breathe, Russo. I know you did,” Fingon said soothingly. “I know it. We all know it. Breathe.” 

“Maglor—he’s right, he’s right. Elrond. How can I tell Elrond? How? Finnu, I can’t tell him. I—I swear to you, I had, I had—“

“B-b-baba, you can’t, you c-c-can’t go—you-you-you can’t g-g-g—fuck! You can’t g——go out like that,” Celebrimbor backed out of the front door ahead of his father and uncle. He was clean-shaven then, dressed in casual, American attire, denim jeans. He’d been out of his pharmaceutical degree, off to start a graduate course soon, because he and his father had wanted to leave politics behind them, and had been this close to breaking the cycle that Fëanor began. 

And yet there stood Curufin the banker, a scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth, long paring knives in each hand, ropes slung over his shoulder, a jerry-can of petrol strapped to his belt, Celegorm behind him adorned in the same, pushing his nephew aside, trying his best not to look at Maedhros not-breathing in Fingon’s arms. 

“Celebrimbor, get in the house, call up the Party office and get them to send out some of the boys to the station, armed,” he barked. “Boy, I told you, move aside!”

“T—t—t—they get you like that, it’ll p-p-p-p—it would it would prove them right,” Celebrimbor stepped back around and infront of them, his hands raised. “Uncle, you’re smarter than this. Please.”

“Move the fuck aside, I won’t say it again. I’ll burn that bloody place down tonight, with the bastards still inside. We’ll lynch every last one.” 

“You do this and they’ll—they’ll c-c-c—they’ll applaud them for it!” Celebrimbor shoved his uncle backwards. “They’ll applaud them for killing cousin Elros and you know it! Family of terrorists! You can do so much more, please, both of you c-c-can do so much more for him if you don’t do this now! Baba, listen to me. Please. You do this and they’ll do the same to you, and—a—and—and nothing changes!” 

“Curufin, you don’t tell your son to move aside, I’ll cut him down where he stands!” Celegorm roared, actually raising the knife to his nephew’s throat. Fingon shut his eyes tight, winding his arms even tighter around Maedhros. “Get out of my way, now!” 

“Celebrimbor, step aside, for fuck’s sake,” Curufin snapped, trying to move between his son and brother. “He’s not messing around, you know this. Please!”

“No.”

“Celebrimbor, you don’t understand, move aside! This kind of insult, this… we can’t take it lying down,” Curufin snapped. “Move aside, boy, I’m ordering you! Celegorm, drop the knife, have you lost your fucking mind? That’s my son!”

“And w—what? Let them hang you? Let them fucking hang you as a N—Na—as a N—Naxal?” Celebrimbor cried out, Celegorm’s knife still tracing the hollow of his throat. “They’ll cheer when it happens, they’ll say they were right to take our Elros in like that. They’ll hang Maedhros for it, you know it, you know they will! You touch them now and they’ll say he orchestrated it!” 

Fingon’s eyes widened. 

“I TOLD YOU TO MOVE!” Celegorm snarled, pushing closer, pressing the knife in. Celebrimbor clenched his jaw, unmoving. Fingon, struck dumb by terror, remained rooted to the spot. Curufin turned urgently to Maedhros, shaking him by the shoulders. 

“Ikka. Maedhros-ikka, he’s going to… please, stop them. He’s not going to listen, he’s lost his mind, my boy, he’s…” he pleaded. “He’ll…”

Maedhros lifted his head at last, face still painfully blank, and took in the scene with a detached, academic air. His dull eyes fixed on the hollow of Celebrimbor’s throat, and the trickle of blood running into his shirt. 

“You’ll cut him down, will you?” he asked Celegorm quietly. “You’re going to cut him down, hm? This child. Your brother’s only son. You’re going to cut his throat, are you?”

“I will if I have to,” Celegorm looked over his shoulder at his brothers, furious and helpless. His voice broke. “What else can I do?” 

“I see,” Maedhros nodded dully, leaning against the wall for support, exhaustion lining his features. “Then go ahead. But you will take him and step out of the gate. Kill him there if you want.”

“What?” spat Curufin, horrified. “Ikka, please! What are you saying?”

“You hear me, Celegorm? Take the boy, stand outside the gate, and cut him down there. Do whatever you want. But this house—Baba built this house.”

“What?” 

“I said, your father built this house with his own damned hands,” Maedhros continued in a tired monotone. “You spill a single drop of your kin’s blood upon this threshold, and I’ll hang you myself. You hear me now? I’ll drag you out there right this second and I’ll hang you myself.”

Celegorm glared at his brother. At the blue-green, curdled swords above his head. “Fuck Baba. Fuck him to hell and back.”

“Are you going to cut him down?” Maedhros asked again. He looked half asleep, barely there. “Don’t try me. That boy’s blood touches the floor of this house, and I’ll kill you. I swear on my sons. I’ll kill you myself. You know I will.” 

“Then what can I do? What can I do?” Celegorm begged. Nobody responded, and he just stood there like a chastised child, looking at each face in turn, as if they would tell him the answer even as their owners didn’t. And when they too stayed silent, he threw the knives aside onto the linoleum and walked out into the dark, weeping and unarmed. 

Celebrimbor clutched his throat, his face twisting as he looked at the blood darkening his fingers, his shirt. “B—b—baba. Go after him. I’ll be fffffine. I’ll be fine. G-—ah, g-g-g-go after him and stay with him. T-t-t-take C-c-c-c—“

“It’s all right,” Curufin said soothingly, placing a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I know. I will. I’ll take Caranthir. Don’t worry. You go up with Haleth, sit with Maglor-uncle in his stead.”

“G-g-go after, go after him, Baba, y—“

“Hush. I will, Celebrimbor. Don’t worry. I’ll stay with him.” 

It was only when Celebrimbor went upstairs that Curufin shut his eyes, shaking from head to toe. Fingon didn’t rise from his position beside Maedhros but spoke softly to his friend. “Curufin, he’ll be fine. Celegorm shouldn’t have done that. But it’s not… your boy will be fine.”

“It’s not the injury,” Curufin pressed a hand to his mouth, trying to retain control. He inhaled raggedly, sitting down hard on the porch platform. “It’s not even Celegorm. It’s barely a scratch, I know, and Celebrimbor was right. But Finnu, my boy… fuck. He was going… we were going to send him abroad. For his Masters. He’s so… he topped his class every year. He’s so clever. We wanted to send him abroad for it. Not the States or London, we couldn’t afford that. But maybe Malaysia. Or the Gulf. Even Russia, maybe.”

Fingon sighed. “I know. You and Deepika had been saving for it, weren’t you?” 

“Twenty five years in that bloody dead-end job. We moved ten hours away. We sent him to the best school we could. Sent him to a good college out of the state, we sent him to Chennai. He believes in the Party, yes, as do I, but he had nothing to do with it. Not even a youth membership. He won, he got out, I got him away from all this,” Curufin choked out as tears began to make their way down his face. “He won’t go now, Finnu. I saw it in his eyes. Just now, I saw it in his eyes. My boy won’t go abroad. He won’t do his Masters, and he won’t take an office job. All I’ve done, all these years, just…” 

He mimed a small explosion with his hands, something going up in a puff of smoke. And then he buried his head in them, shaking. Maedhros gave no sign that he’d heard any of it, though his jaw was clenched so tight Fingon could see every thin cord of muscle running across it. 

It is late when Maglor returns, and the house is in complete darkness as he gropes his way into the hallway with an oil-lamp, only to find Elrond’s door wide open. 

“Hell, the power’s out,” his son groans, burying his face in the pillow, yawning. “Great. I’m going to sweat to death now. Oh, listen, Elladan spiked a fever—nothing high, don’t worry at all. He was just a little uncomfortable and kept tossing and turning, so we thought it best to bring Elrohir downstairs with us. I was waiting up to hand him off to you, but he fell asleep in our bed. And then so did I, though god only knows how. Do you want me to wake him?”

“No, no, don’t worry,” Maglor waves a hand, raising his lamp and smiling at the sight of Elrohir and Celebrían taking up three quarters of the bed, leaving the lanky Elrond practically hanging off the edge. “Let him stay there, it’ll be a nightmare to put him down again. I’ll go and see to the fever, you sleep. Just call me if he wakes or wants something.”

He takes the stairs quietly, but Elladan is not in his room, so he wanders back downstairs, wondering whether he should start panicking, or if the boy, like the last time the twins went ‘missing’, would just be found sleeping in a tree in the backyard “as a treat we gave ourselves because we’re such good boys”. He creeps through the living room and starts across the courtyard to get to the back of the house, and realises Maedhros’ door is wide open too to stave off the heat.

His brother is dead to the world and snoring like a foghorn as he tends to, being such a ridiculously heavy sleeper that Fingon had to train himself to not assume the man was dead every time he slept through thunderstorms, sirens, phone calls and ‘being physically shaken awake’. And Elladan is asleep right beside him, tousled head on Maedhros’ bare chest, skin-to-skin in the night air with a cold compress resting crookedly across his brow. There’s a steam pot in the corner of the desk and Maglor can picture the way his brother would have held the boy over it to loosen the congestion in his chest, promising him he’d get to turn into a dragon one day if he kept it up. The scent of mint, lemon and cumin hovers around the doorway, various little remedies the two of them had tried-and-erred on Elrond and his brother all those years ago. Maglor can’t help the way his mouth twitches up into a smile as he silently enters the room, pinching Maedhros’ shoulder hard enough to bruise (violent, perhaps, but necessary for this particular sleeper). 

“Fuck off, Finnu, I swear I’ll cut your throat if you wake me again,” he mutters, shoving out as he stirs awake. “I’ll smother you in your sleep, don’t try me.” 

“Oh shut up, it’s just me, though I now see why our dear Finnu voluntarily shares a bedroom with you, you charmer,” Maglor whisper-laughs, placing the oil lamp on the bedside table. “I was just looking for Elladan. Come, I’ll carry him up to his room and leave you in peace. Allah knows how on earth he’s managed to sleep this long with you sawing wood like a leopard right beside him.”

“No, no, let him stay. Finnu is out for the night, he has an early class to teach in Kasargod, so there’s plenty of room here,” Maedhros sits up properly, his arm tightening slightly around the sleeping child. “I… unless you think… I mean. Unless you think he should go back upstairs. Then of course.”

Maglor sighs, shoving Maedhros’ legs aside so he can sit down on the bed too. “No, I don’t think so. Of course not. Not at all. Nothing like that. I just didn’t want him to disturb you.” 

“He couldn’t disturb me. I’ll be fine. The power went out, and he was a little afraid alone upstairs once Cello took Elrohir down with them. So I thought I’d bring him in for a little, but I fell asleep as well,” Maedhros explains awkwardly. “I hope that wasn’t too… I don’t mean to overstep. He was feverish, see, so I thought I’d keep an eye on his temperature.” 

“Ikka, please. Of course it isn’t an issue. Please don’t say that.”

“All right. Sorry.”

This had once come so easily to them, the one-two-three of co-parenting twins. You supervise Elrond’s bath, I’ll make sure Elros doesn’t hit him with a mud pie the minute he steps out. Elros’ asthma is bad today, you keep Elrond distracted and I’ll get Elros to use his inhalers without choking. They’re both being little devils and clawing at each other, you take Elros to the lake and I’ll take Elrond on a walk in the woods, and we’ll both try not to go fully grey in the next two hours. All of it is so stilted now, so caught up in policy and paperwork: this six year old child is afraid in the dark, may I, his grandfather, lay beside him? A bureaucratic nightmare. As if all they learned had gone up in smoke in one night, when their boy couldn’t breathe in Kasaba Station and neither of them had heard the rattle of his chest. 

“Of course it’s fine,” he says again. “I just…”

“Eh?”

“Felt a little guilty,” Maglor admits honestly, though he doesn’t let slip the march-shaped circumstances for said guilt. “That you’re doing all this for them, and I haven’t even… that the boys don’t even call you their grandfather.”

Maedhros snorts. “If Celegorm and Finrod turned into dogfuckers every time I called them dogfuckers, there would be countless little mongrels walking around Kozhikode on their hind legs.”

“What?”

“They can call me a crocodilefucker if they want. I will still be their grandfather.” 

“I could… you live here now. I could tell them to call you g–”

“Don’t.” 

“Don’t? Ikka, it was wrong of me to not tell them. Even if you didn’t live here, I should have told them at least, that you’re their grandfather too. And now you’re saying… no?”

“No, Maglor,” he replies, his hand drifting absently to Elladan’s sweaty forehead, brushing his curls away from it and adjusting the washcloth. “Don’t do it. Let them call me uncle. Or whatever else they want. Or even just my name.”

“Why not?” Maglor asks, moving closer. All he can see are his brother’s eyes, glowing green in the dark. “I thought—I thought you wanted that. Why this sudden refusal, hm? If you think it’ll confuse them, that’s not an issue. They’re so young, they’ll pick it up quickly, find some kind of nickname or variation.”

“Nothing to do with that.”

“Then what, ikka?”

A long silence. 

“It takes so little these days,” Maedhros admits, as if the darkness makes it easier to say. “Just. Little things, little words. Something small, something nobody would even consider… and I just lose it. I have to make something hurt. It has always taken very little, I know you know this. But these days… it takes nothing. I nearly shattered that man’s jaw the other day, that man with the bloody petrol bomb. These days, it takes nearly nothing for me to see red, and then there I am again. Back where I had been, standing there helpless.”

“At Kasaba?”

“No, no. This was long before Kasaba, you know this,” Maedhros actually laughs. “No. I’m standing at the sepoy’s office, and Baba has just set fire to himself. Always, when I lose it—there I am. There I am, standing alone in that crowd.”

For a long minute, Maglor doesn’t know what to say. He hadn’t known that that was where his brother went, during those split-second losses of control. To the feet of Fëanor, then, that martyr of martyrs. Whose desperate fire did not die in his body but found a home in that forced-witness of a sixteen year old, turning into a series of flashpoints across his life. Rearing his head every time something green dares to spout, covering it in ash.

“Ammë once told me,” he says at last. “That she hated Baba for it. That it was the only time she ever felt true hatred for him.” 

“Really?” Maedhros smiles wryly. “That might explain why she chopped up his writing desk for firewood, the day after I came back after throwing that damned bomb.”

“To be honest, she’d been threatening to do that since I was three, so it slipped by me at the time. But ikka,” Maglor returns to the topic at hand. “You’re not like that with the children. You have never been so to our boys, and I have faith in you that you won’t ever be. Is that truly what worries you?” 

“Not that I would lose it at them, of course not. But… they would witness it. They have. And so have Elrond and Elros,” Maedhros says, halting. He pauses, tries to gather the words together. “That I know is inevitable, for it has already happened. I don’t want them to grow up with a grandfather who… knowing that their father’s father is like me. I know I’m not their blood, and neither are you. Still, that will make as little difference for them as it had for our boys.”

“What, you don’t want them to… what? Think they would inherit your temper?”

“It’s not just temper though, is it?” Maedhros leans back against the headboard, running his fingers through Elladan’s hair. “It would have been easy, had it just been temper. No. I don’t want them growing up thinking that something like this is in their blood through a direct inheritance: that they have something of me in them, and thus have no other choice but to be like this. Like… coming across your lineage, written down in some old book, and finding out that at some point in your family tree, there roars a rabid, man-eating tiger. That a part of you is that… that animal.” 

“You’re not an animal,” Maglor snaps, not caring that it might wake Elladan. Maedhros’ eyes are wide and green in the dark, always. Cat eyes, Maglor knows they’re called around these parts. His brother, who covers the bedroom mirror with a bedsheet. That at some point in your family tree, there sits a rabid, man-eating tiger. “You’re not. You can call yourself a fucking cunt with hair-trigger rage and a gold-star terrorism certificate, but don’t you dare call yourself less than human. Not before me, and not before these children.” 

“Don’t try and placate me. That’s your problem, it always has been. I don’t care what you do or don’t call it, Maglor, I’m just asking you to do one thing,” Maedhros is just as heated, whisper-arguing like they used to back when their own boys were young and asleep. “One thing. It’s the only… only wish I have for them. And to do that, you have to let these boys keep calling me their uncle. Not grandfather. And you can’t deny that this, what I ask of you, isn’t the same as what you would wish for them.”

“What is it?”

Maedhros takes in a deep, shuddering inhale. Lets it out slowly. Repeats the motions. Laughs breathlessly. “Sorry. Sorry, I’m sitting here acting like it’s some enormous, tragic secret, when I know it’s what anyone would want for them. What you already want for them. And it’s something only you can give them, I think. We all think.”

“I want a thousand things for them,” Maglor tweaks Elladan’s little toe, gets a sleepy kick to his knee in return. “Ouch! That’s gratefulness for you!” 

Maedhros doesn’t laugh this time. He looks across at Maglor, beseeching. “Don’t let them turn out like me.”

Maglor feels his lip trembling, bites down on it. “Ikka, don’t… your life was so different to the lives they live. The circumstances aren’t the same.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Maedhros says curtly. “Arwen. She lived in the lap of luxury. Our Elros, we gave him all we could. And yes, these boys did not see their father die before their eyes. But one day they’ll be old enough to know that nobody did. That nobody saw their father die except the ones who killed him. And then…”

Maglor looks down at his own hands, ends roughened by sitars and scrubbing brushes. He wants to say no, no, of course not, ikka. Wanted to say any boy would be lucky to become a man like you. But his brother always knows when he’s lying, and he doesn’t want this to be yet another wall between them. He wonders if it’s really possible, if nooses can be loosened. If a small shift in how a story is sung can send a different rhythm into the future. 

“I used to hope that one day, the world would tire of making men like me,” Maedhros continues, closing his eyes, like it was too much effort to keep them open. “But I don’t think it will. So I turn to you. Again. Don’t let them turn out like me. Don’t let them need to unlearn their grandfather. Let it all end with me. If you tell me to never meet their eyes again, I won’t.” 

Maglor cannot speak, and doesn’t. 

“Can you do that?” Maedhros persists, leaning forward and taking his brother’s hand. “Can I put this on your shoulders just once more? This house can’t take this another time, Maglor. I can’t take this. I can’t take this a third time.” 

“Third time?” Maglor asks, watching the blood drain from his brother’s face as he realises what he’s just said. “What do you mean the third time?” 

Maedhros doesn’t respond for a long time. 

“I used to write to her,” his voice is impossibly quiet when he speaks at last, like saying it aloud would conjure up that foreign fire in their pitch black room. “Arwen. I used to write to Arwen.” 

“For her birthdays? I remember you volunteering to send off the packages every year.”

“No. Every month, for ten years,” Maedhros tells him. “One from her, one from me.”

“I see.” 

He does. He watches Maedhros sitting at the table, hunched over a page, lips moving faintly as he tests each line before setting it down, because whilst he could punch just as hard with his left hand, it was far harder for him to write with it. He knows the words would be far gentler than any he could speak. He sees in him the actor and the witness, composing the line and listening for its echo, the self that yearns and the self that burns. One more version of Maedhros drapes over the others, though none are displaced. 

“Maedhros, it’s…” 

“I know. I know how awful it is. Don’t speak of it now, it’s…” 

“No. It’s one of the most wonderful things, ikka,” Maglor laughs under his breath, blinking hard. “One of the most wonderful things I’ve heard of late.”

“Wonderful? Have you gone mad, brother? What wonder? The child is dead.”

“I know. That’s why it’s a wonder. She was here for such a short time,” Maglor shakes his head, still smiling, subdued moonlight glinting on his teeth. “Such a viciously short time. And she was such a good girl. So smart, so confident, a delightful thing. Remember she would go around on her birthday sending us presents?  She would have had so much love ahead of her: more friends, more admirers, husband, children. Grandchildren. Allah, she could have had the love of grandchildren.”

“Don’t. Don’t say things like that. I… fuck’s sake,” his brother turns his face away. “Don’t.” 

“I’m sorry. I’m not saying it to upset you. Because to me, knowing she was loved that much, that one more person loved that child just that much more than I had thought. That she had that much more love, to take with her as a gift. To open and surround herself with where she is. I think that is a wonderful thing to hear about someone you have lost, don’t you agree?”

“Fucking hell, Maglor,” Maedhros grins when his voice cracks on the expletive, shaking his head. “You can never give it a… fuck. Saying things like that at three in the morning. You’re killing me, you know?”

“He says, after chainsmoking since he was twelve years old,” Maglor retorts, punching his brother’s shoulder lightly. “My dearest ikka, living your life like it’s a very long suicide note, and now you say you’re killed by my… poetic mindset?” 

“Allah mian, you really fucking said… suicide note, shut the fuck—” Maedhros gasps, starting to laugh truly but trying to keep it down so as to not wake Elladan. “You complete cocksucker, how…”

“The one and only card-carrying cocksucker our Amme gave birth to is in this room right now, it isn’t me and it certainly isn’t the little one.” 

Maedhros clamps a hand over his mouth, shaking with uncontrollable laughter. “You know, I’ve thrashed people for far less.” 

“You’ve thrashed me for far less, let’s not speak in the abstract,” Maglor mutters. “And you’re a terrible influence. I never thought I’d say that word infront of our grandchildren.” 

“They’re not only our grandchildren,” Maedhros says again, after a long silence where he simply sat stroking Elladan’s sweaty hair, unconsciously picking out the tangles. “You know that, don’t you?” 

“Aren’t they?” Maglor blinks, swiftly drying his eyes. “Fatima’s parents were dead long back, no? Who else?”

“You know who else, I think.”

Maglor nods. 

“I know. She was very young then, wasn’t she? When she was here,” his face twists in simultaneous sympathy and bitterness, the exact same expression that once caught on Nerdanel’s face when she first set eyes upon Elwing. “I remember Elros saying once… when he reconciled with her, after she let him come back. He mentioned she’d just turned nineteen when they were born.” 

Maedhros nods. “Arwen’s age.”

Always, the same shapes. 

“She called, earlier this evening,” Maedhros explains. “Wanted to talk to Cello about some British shopping nonsense but she and Elrond were out, so this donkey and his brother picked up the call.”

“They tend to do that, yes. I’ve been wondering if I could set up some kind of mousetrap that gives them a pinch every time they try.”

“Yes, well, they were talking for half an hour. Forcing the woman to describe some bloody toyshop in London from top to bottom, as if they both live in a tree and have never seen toys in their life. And when I sniffed out where the hell they were and took the phone back, said sorry for wasting god-knows-how-much money on collect charges, you know what she told me?” Maedhros shakes his head. “You know what she… fucking hell, Maglor. She told me she’s never heard their voices before. That it… was the first time. Her grandchildren, Maglor. The way she sounded when she said it.” 

Maglor groans from behind his fingers. “Well, my first thought is to drag Elrond out of bed and skin him alive. If he had told us…”

“Likewise. Don’t worry. I’ve given him an earful already.”

“Second thought, though. Frankly, would we have done much, had he told us?” Maglor grimaces self-consciously. “At least, until all this had happened, until he returned. We wouldn’t have, would we? I know myself. I know you. We’d not have done a thing. Even if she’d asked. Hell, especially if she’d asked.”

Maedhros nods. “We wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. That’s why, I’ve been thinking all evening. About that, I mean. It’s been playing on my mind ever since. So, and I swear this isn’t anything as heavy, but can I ask you to do me one more favour?”

“Well, book-ending the day with a favour the moment I wake up and two when I go to bed… saints must have had a hell of a time. But yes, of course I can. What is it?” 

“My study upstairs. The old desk I brought over from Finnu’s place, since you don’t have one here, not after poor Baba’s writing desk was burned for biryani decades ago. Anyway, listen. Second drawer, there’s a few old papers and all that. Underneath it, there’s…”

“If you say it’s a fucking will, Maedhros, I will borrow a crucifix from your beloved Finnu and shove you up on it.” 

“Shut it, sitarfucker, as if you could crucify anyone. Better hire Finarfin, probably does it for a carton of eggs. No, listen. Under the papers, there’s an envelope, and no it isn’t a will. Just… take it. Then you write one letter, in English. See why I’m asking you?” 

“I suppose so, yes, although if the criteria is better than you at English, our little friend here could do it also.” 

“I will fucking kill you while you’re taking the best shit of your life if you interrupt me again, Maglor, Allah be my witness. Now shut the fuck up and listen. In the envelope, there’s a flight ticket. A return from London to here—well, Cochin, that is. Rest of the way will have to be via Finnu-taxi. You take that envelope, go to the travel agency in Mavoor Road and have the passenger details cleared.” 

“Eh? How on earth did you afford a return ticket to and from London?” Maglor gives a low whistle. “Those cost more than what most people here make in a year, I nearly laid an egg when Cello told me the price of her flight. Did you rob a bank? Did you sell Finnu to some film studio as a budget choreographer? Is that why he isn’t here tonight?” 

“As if Curufin would let me rob his dear workplace, and as if anyone would buy Finnu and not return him after the third time he complains about their oddly high internal body temperature making it difficult to sleep next to them,” Maedhros grins, mimicking Fingon’s voice perfectly. “No, I saved for this. Took nearly a year, mind you. Bloody ripoff, this Air India, but colour me surprised. Witch-in-charge probably bought a new fridge with it or something.”

He pauses, tries to come up with something better, but lands resignedly on an old favourite. “Planefucker.” 

“Very good. But what do you want me to do with this ticket? I assume you’re not exactly sending me to London to get your shirts drycleaned?”

“No, I need you to write that English letter, I told you,” Maedhros clicks his teeth impatiently. “To Elrond’s mother. Invite her down here for Eid—if you don’t mind, that is. Tell her to stay for a few weeks. Maybe say we’re going to forcefully get her son to do a marriage ceremony at last, that little degenerate. But yes. Do you think we could do that? The twins will be on holidays then, wouldn’t they? And she’s retired, so I assume she has nothing better to do anyway, from how she describes her days. All that Harrods and what not.”

“Ah. Yes, of course.” 

“Right. Then you send that off tomorrow. Don’t… don’t say it came from me. Make it sound like it’s from you. I don’t want it to sound like I’m gunning for some sort of atonement, because I’m not. It’s… you just gave me the idea anyway. All that about there being one more person to love Arwen. So, you send that to her, and send the ticket also.”

Maglor nods. “I will. That’s, yes, of course I will. It’s the least we could do, I think. But why on earth are you sending her a flight ticket? She’s very wealthy, technically speaking she paid for both Elrond and Cello to come over. I’m sure she could buy her own, and would probably prefer it. Did you really save up for a year?” 

“No, obviously not. Do I look stupid enough to go save up so some rich woman can fly here on my dime? I had it for another reason,” Maedhros snaps shortly, though his voice shakes. “It doesn’t matter. I have no more use for it. And I don’t want to look at the damn thing either, so please just get it and send it to her.” 

“Was it for Arwen?” 

Maedhros says nothing, but the way he bows his head tells Maglor all he needs to know. His face crumples, and he tries to school it. “I can’t bear to look at it.”

“Maedhros, you’re upset. Let me stay here with you,” Maglor says. “I’ll take care of it in the morning.” 

“No, no, you go and write the letter now,” Maedhros says thickly, brushing a hand across his nose and coughing to clear his throat. “I’m fine. I’m not upset. Just… let the boy stay here tonight, hm?”                   

“Let me stay too.”

“No, Maglor. Leave me be.”          

When Maedhros lifts his head again, his eyes are wet, pleading. Something between them recalibrates itself. It isn’t revelation nor the unmasking of any illusion; their bond has always run too deep to be destabilised by cruel truths, they knew that since the day Maedhros had first left the cliff-house. Still, something foundational has shifted with this flurry of admissions. A listing structure, long assumed stable. You tug at the rope—once, twice—and the statue holds. You tug again, and this time, imperceptibly, it begins to lean. Not a collapse, but a slow yielding. The balance changes. Maedhros tells him of Arwen, but wants Maglor to leave him alone. They are still themselves, but not quite where they stood before.        

“All right,” Maglor agrees. “I’ll leave the lamp here. In case he wakes up. It’s hot out, so he probably will.” 

He leaves the room, but stands in the corridor, just out of sight. Maglor doesn’t need a set of silver swords and a mosque-full of witnesses to practice his chosen method of self-flagellation. Achacha, can we go watch the ratheeb? No, we have the ratheeb at home.                                             

Maedhros’ face seizes and he buries it in Elladan’s thick mop of curls, shaking. To Maglor, it seems a miracle the boy doesn’t wake at how tightly his grandfather is holding him. But he knows this shape too: it was one Maglor himself had made, just a couple months back when Maedhros had refused to let him sell Arwen’s dowry and accused him of keeping him away from the twins. And now here he is, begging him to keep the twins away from him. Sobbing into a little boy’s messy hair in the dead of the night, making no sound at all. He forces himself to watch. 

Who needs whom? A parent needs a child as much as a child needs a parent. Maglor knows that, though he doesn’t know why he’s standing here like this, watching his brother’s sorrow through a crack of light in the door. He’s certain that in a normal country, they’d probably haul people off to the asylum for doing things like this, watching people cry like this without saying anything or trying to help them through their pain. But then again, in a normal country, his brother wouldn’t be reduced to tears over a flight ticket, reduced to clutching his grandson just to feel partially human. 

The moment ends when Elladan stirs awake, whimpering with his eyes glazed over, disturbed by a minor peal of thunder from outside. Maglor, despite his mood, finds himself laughing silently: trust Elladan to happily sleep through the weeping and his grandfathers arguing away for almost an hour right beside him, but shooting straight up at some tiny cloud rumble in Rameswaram or somewhere equally distant. Maedhros sits up too, hastily bringing up the bedsheet and rubbing his face. 

“Come now, settle back down, Elladan,” he says hoarsely. “You need rest if you want to get better fast-fast.”

“No.” 

“No?” 

“I won’t sleep. I’m scared now.”

“No need to be scared. You want your achachan to sit with you? I can go call him, he’s just across the courtyard in his room. Or you want to go to Elrohir?”

“No, don’t go, I’m scared, I told you, stupid,” Elladan whines, clutching onto Maedhros’ arm, his lower lip trembling. Maglor rolls his eyes at the theatrics, still smiling a little. “There’s dark. If you go it’ll be more dark. I’m scared, I said. And it’s hot. The fan’s not working. So, I won’t sleep today.”

“That’s fine. Then I’ll stay. You think any dark can get past me, hm? I told you about me thrashing Daddy Finarfin a few months back, remember?”

Elladan hums in tentative agreement. Maglor hears his brother shuffle around slightly, picking up a sheaf of newspaper from the floor. Then the back-and-forth whoosh of it cutting through the air, as Maedhros fans the feverish child in the absence of the ceiling fan’s comforting whirr. “How’s this? Better, isn’t it?” 

“Yes, thank you, uncle. Better.”

“Good. Now, try and lie down for a little while. You don’t have to sleep.”

“Uncle also lie down then,” Elladan demands. “Here. Or else you’ll go outside, I know.”

“All right, all right, Baby Sultan,” Maedhros acquiesces, shifting forward, and then lies down properly, still fanning the newspaper so it sends a soft stream of cool air towards the boy’s sweaty face. 

“OK? Happy?” he chuckles wetly. “Or you want me to bring a palanquin and silk sheets also?”

“Yes, please!” said the boy. He looks intently at Maedhros, pauses for a moment and then rustles about, grabbing a pot of Vicks menthol vapour-rub from the bedside table and streaking it across his grandfather’s chest. 

“Oho, what’s all this? Ah!” Maedhros starts laughing properly now, high and clear and genuine in a way Maglor hasn’t heard for years. God. How he’s missed it. “Aha! That tickles, Elladan! Oh, eek, ha! What are you trying to do, trying to give my chest a new hairstyle?” 

“Fixing you,” Elladan says, business-like and bossy in a way Maglor unfortunately recognises as a personal inheritance from himself. “You’re sniffy. You caught my sickness. I told you, I told you you would, didn’t I? I’ll do this first, then you inhale from the steamer, see there in the corner, then you tell achachan to make you hot lemon-water because he makes it better than you and he puts sugar in it because he’s not stingy like you. But I’m doing Vicks for you so maybe you’ll get better fast-fast. Or maybe you’ll die, and it’ll be a waste of time. But I’ll still do it.”

“Oh, Elladan,” Maedhros barely holds on to himself as he pulls the child closer to him, breathless. “How good you are.”

Don’t let him turn out like me. 

This is the problem, isn’t it? Maglor thinks dully, his feet still incapable of carrying him away from the corridor. This has always been the problem with Maedhros. The way he loves these children. The way they love him. Love, even grandparental, is not always clean in its direction. It can come freighted with fear and memory, with the need to rewrite oneself through someone smaller. It can slip into something possessive and punitive. Not all love nourishes. Some of it pools, stagnates and rots. What happens when the Pied Piper of Hamelin loves, loves, loves every stolen child dancing to his flute? Does it stop them drowning? Were they happy when they drowned? Does it make a difference if you drowned laughing? 

“Better, uncle? I’ve put the entire tub on, so you’ll be better.” 

“Much better,” he smiles down at his chest, covered in a layer of wax so thick he anticipates he’ll be getting one of his brothers to fetch at least ten buckets for his bath in the morning. He wipes his eyes again, settling back down from his elbows. “Thanks to my little doctor. Now. You don’t have to sleep, but I have a story for you. You know that Daddy Finarfin’s Baba was a dinosaur?” 

“Which dinosaur?”

“Big one. Huge. What’s the one with all the teeth? Little baby arms. You know it?”  

“T-rex?”

“That’s the one, clever boy! That’s Finarfin’s father. His Ammë saw him eating some poor old sheep near Kovil temple one day. One big swallow, that was the end of poor Mr Sheep. She fell in love on sight, and the next day itself they got married.”

“How do you know that?”

“Your Uncle Elrond was that sheep in a past life.” 

“And how do you know they got married?” giggles Elladan. 

“I know because my Baba was contracted to prepare the wedding venue. He had to climb all the way to the roof and drill a hole on top of St Joseph’s church, so that the dinosaur could fit inside.” 

“Does he still live in Kozhikode?”

“Dinosaur or Finarfin? If you mean Finarfin, sadly he is still alive and living in Kozhikode.”

“No, the dinosaur!”

“Oh, then sadly he is not,” Maedhros sighs. “In 1950, Kozhikode was facing a big money shortage. So we had to sell Finarfin’s dinosaur father to Japan. He’s a big-time film star there now.” 

Maglor has to clap a hand to his mouth to stifle a sudden snort. He stands there in the dark till his knees begin to ache, listening to Maedhros’ terrible and hilarious story about the dinosaur father who starred in Godzilla, whose arms became as short as they are after two years of carrying around the enormous baby that Finarfin apparently was. Elladan is most of the way back to sleep when he finishes, and Maedhros sends him the rest of the way with the same hummed lullaby the two of them used to use on their first set of twins. 

Who are you? Where have you gone?  

Who is his Baba’s best baby boy?

For your father, aren’t you the sweetest honey?

In our hearts, aren’t you a thousand blooms? 

Who are you, where have you gone? 

Who is his Baba’s best baby boy?

It’s a simple song, one of the most common South Indian lullabies. The lyrics change and shift across languages and regions, pronouns and parentage shift meanings, add and take words away. Especially when you had two boys wanting to be two different things, raised by two fathers. But the tune remains the same, floating and familiar to all who hears it. 

And there between its lines, time bends. Notes unfold and permeate the walls between Maglor and his brother, between Elladan and Elrohir and Elrond and Elros. All six of them had heard it at some point, and so, Maglor knows, has Arwen. Time loops gently inwards through it, all the way back to him and his brother, half-asleep, crossing and uncrossing lines across the courtyard, two weary, heartsick terrorist-orphan-boys with sleepless infants in their arms. The lullaby weaves it all together in its seamless rhythm, and he feels oddly unburdened by it. He doesn’t try to dig into the reasons why. 

Elladan won’t remember this moment, not consciously. But perhaps, Maglor hopes, as he knows his brother does, it will root somewhere inside him, invisible and plentiful, filling him from within. So many versions of that old house of artisans is already lost. This too Maglor knows. The quiet evenings, nose-to-textbook with Nerdanel supervising them, ruler-in-hand, the dinner-table arguments about rats and dinosaurs and which of the Fëanorian brothers had been truly fathered by the monkey which escaped from Kozhikode Zoo in the early twenties, and Fëanor taking part in them even though the argument was, technically speaking, about him being cuckolded by a monkey. Maglor knows of all the stories that vanish for want of a listener, and how easily one voice can become the only one heard, the only one some child in Oxford had left to listen to. But here, now, in this fragile offering from secret-grandfather to secret-grandson, something of those Kozhikode Zoo monkey arguments survives still. Maglor’s small act of witness. 

And he knows, without needing to say it aloud, that such songs are not only sung for the comfort of children. They are sung to keep truth alive, and to tether yourself to other lives that may turn out to be vastly different from yours. Of course Maglor knows this. After all, why else would he have sung those same six lines that very afternoon, cross-legged on a truck-bed? To the crowd at Kasaba Station, and the bones of his boy. 

Chapter Text

As the eldest son of two reasonably well-known and well-heeled artisans adamant on having a large family to carry on their name and work, there had been a reasonable amount of thought put into the true-naming of Maedhros Fëanorian. Or at least, much more than was put into the naming of, say, the Ambarussa, for by the time those two were born, even Fëanor and Nerdanel’s formidable creativity had been exhausted to the point they debated whether children truly needed names, and whether a uniquely pitched whistle might serve as a substitute. 

In the Malabari Muslim tradition, they gave Maedhros three names: two forenames, then the father-name. Mohammad, after the prophet, meaning admirable, and Razul for apostle. Then bin Faraz, son-of-Faraz, after his father, for Faraz had been Feanor’s true name: the risen. Whilst Mohammad Razul bin Faraz was a noble and worthy name, the child in question had never actually been expected to go by it, because Mohammads were a dime a dozen on the Malabar coast. Especially because little Maedhros had been a fiendish, gutter-mouthed creature with a precocious penchant for casual violence, and it sometimes felt rather blasphemous to address him as Mohammad. 

Most children in Kerala have a pet name and a true name, and pet names in themselves have peaks and troughs of popularity and distinct cultural trends, operating through a fashion economy separate from true names. In fact, they had very little to do with true names. For instance, it would have been perfectly normal for three girls whose birth certificates read Jennifer Kuruvilla, Nasreena Malayil and Geetanjali Vellayil to all answer to ‘Ammu’, the most enduring female pet-name in the state. 

Sometimes, these pet names even had political motivations, such as with Finarfin’s son-in-law Celeborn, who did not actually know he was named Celeborn until he was seventeen, having exclusively answered to ‘Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’ from the moment of his birth. Or the case of young Curufin, true-named Sarfaraz after his father, who had tried to call him ‘Trotsky’ for the majority of his toddlerhood before Nerdanel thankfully put her foot down. It had been Nerdanel who came up with Maedhros as well, when he was just old enough to walk, a little portmanteau pet name for a promising little boy. 

And so Maedhros had gone by Maedhros all his life, simply Maedhros and sometimes Fëanorian: election brochures, (falsified) birth certificates, marklist signatures and motorbike licenses. He would probably have done so even if they had named him Trainwreck bin Spontaneous Combustion. In fact, Maedhros was so firmly established as the only name he went by that Elrond and Elros had actually been startled by the newspaper headline when their father was sentenced for his terrorism charge. For there, of course, he was Mohammad Razul bin Faraz. 

____________________________

The imminent arrival of Elwing meant a grand-scale restructuring of the cliff-house, which had by this point finally run out of rooms to house its increasing population, because, according to Curufin, “even Feanor had not considered half of the United Kingdom coming to stay in dear old Kozhikode”. This restructuring had caveats, of course. Maglor had decreed that under no circumstances would he let the twins sleep in a room with an openable window, and also shot down any suggestion that involved his own little study-plus-music-studio being rejigged for sleeping purposes, claiming that even minute furniture adjustments would “irreparably impact the acoustics”. 

It had taken three days of constant arguments, aggravated by Fingon’s Goldilocks-esque approach to compromise and vehement refusal to sleep on any bed either harder or softer than the one in his and Maedhros’ room, that Maglor remembered his older brother’s study—which, though refurnished with his belongings after his return to the cliff-house, the man himself had not been occupying much these days, the election run-up meaning he was increasingly needed on the streets due to the rather confusing uptick of inter-party violence. And thus, he decided, it could be temporarily remodelled into a bedroom for their newest guest. 

“I just wanted to point out, for the fourth time today, that you didn’t go to all these lengths for me,” Celebrian had complained to him, almost offended. “All you did was make Elrond start sleeping inside, which is the bare minimum. And you did that even though I’d not even have minded a nice little porch setup like the one he had. Where’s my redesigned bedroom, Abba?” 

“You sleep with Elrond voluntarily and on a daily basis,” Maglor reminded her, elbow deep in the kitchen hearth, trying to clear out sixteen or so years of log-fire debris in case Elwing took it upon herself to inspect his cooking setup. “Clearly you have very few standards when it comes to sleeping quarters, so all I needed to do was find a few passable blankets. And I did not deny you the porch out of cruelty. It’s one thing for your husband to snore away on the porch wearing only his underpants (horrible habit) like a destitute cat, because hairy sahib-nipples have never really titillated the erotic imaginations of Kozhikode. But the minute you start doing such things, Cello-sahiba, pretty blonde madam as you are… let’s just say the local male population will start selling tickets and binoculars for their viewing parties.”

“Well, at least you haven’t offered the porch to Elwing either,” Celebrian acquiesced. “Though I feel like she’d peel you like an orange if you even suggested it. Still, and I risk repeating myself here, I think you’re going a bit too far. Elrond said you sent him out last night to buy a full-tent mosquito net to go over her bed! A tent. You only gave us those cheap little repellent coils, and we had to make do with one.” 

“You have voluntarily exchanged bodily fluids with Elrond, have you not?” Maglor extricated himself from the hearth in order to piously press his sooty hands together. “Then don’t worry. Mosquito repulsion runs through your veins… your beloved ate three or four of those mosquito coils as an infant one time when ikka fell asleep watching him. To this day I am plagued by confusion at how he didn’t drop dead on the spot. However, after all that, a single Good Knight jumbo coil is more than enough to top up the balance. I run a house, Cello-dear, this is not the Hilton. Buy a spider. Buy a frog. Start catching them with your fingers. Compromise is important.” 

“Unless you’re Elwing, who gets the biggest bedroom.”

“Unless you’re Elwing, then you get the biggest bedroom, yes.”

Maedhros had easily agreed to the repurposing of his study as a guest bedroom for Elwing, but being a proud graduate of the “it should be illegal for men to do housework that does not include hammering, battering, or cutting things down” school of misogyny, had point-blank refused to set up the bed, strip the wallpaper or, astagfirullah, god forbid, put sheets on the mattress and take his clothes rack downstairs. Maglor on the other hand, threw himself into a programme of cellar-to-attic deep-cleaning so thorough that he began tying Elladan and Elrohir to the coconut palm in the garden on very long yet perfectly measured leashes, so they had reasonable freedom of movement but could not track in their usual cupfuls of mud and badly-smuggled fish. 

The occupants of the full-to-bursting cliff-house had several potential explanations for this sudden preoccupation with dust levels. Curufin was certain it was the advent of a midlife crisis, and Celebrían, always a good friend to her father in law, opined that he was simply being nice. Fingon called it a “rightfully guilty conscience”, and pointed out that no length of brocade-curtain could truly make up for stealing and raising someone else’s children.

Celebrimbor approvingly called his uncle a born-again feminist and a new-age man. Haleth said nothing at all, but gestured widely around the house, pointed a finger at her temple and wiggled it in a circle. Celegorm, when asked, rolled his eyes and declared as if it were obvious: “Elrond’s mother is a looker, and our Maglor considers himself a casanova.” 

This last one had caused no small amount of consternation in poor Elrond, not because of Celegorm’s suggestion in itself, but because Maglor, when confronted with the accusation, refused to either confirm or deny the statement, responding only: “I’m a mammal, Elrond.”  

“What the fuck do you mean you’re a mammal?” Elrond had demanded. “What is that meant to mean? Abba, I swear if you even look at my mother, I will…”

“Sleep outside in your boxers?” Maglor pressed a hand to his chest. “Have biscuits in bed so your built-in house-maid of a father can come sweep them up? Lounge around at midday claiming to be writing just when I need someone to go to the market? Very scary threats. Forget your mother, I will never look at another woman again.”

“You know, I just called Elwing to tell her who was going to pick her up,” Celebrían cheerfully informed Elrond later that same evening, spotting an opportunity to Make Things Worse. “I told her it would be Fingon, described his car and all of that, and she said she’d been hoping the ‘handsome film connoisseur’ might have come along, as she recently discovered they have similar tastes in cinema.” 

“Baba likes films…” Elrond said weakly. “It could be him. He goes to the cinema every week. And they’re, er. Sort of friends, I suppose.”

“Elrond, your Baba goes to watch the same monster movie every Saturday until it leaves the theatres to the point he can quote every single growl and scream, pitch-perfect. But can you look me in the eye and tell me your mother genuinely considers Jaws and Godzilla to be ‘films’? Do you think Lady Elwing of Devon is well acquainted with King Kong? You know it is not Maedhros she means, beloved.” 

There was only one party left to ask.

“I’m afraid Celegorm is right,” Maedhros sighs theatrically over his breakfast when consulted on the matter at last. He feigns a casual, uncaring air, despite having spent several days conspicuously coughing and rustling his newspapers when the subject was brought up in the hopes someone would ask him for his opinion. “Good-natured as she is, this woman used to live in Viceroy House. From what Elrond says, she owns half of Exitland or wherever the fuck they lived. Maglor being this obliging to someone like that… he never would be, unless his interminable internal flirt has possessed him entirely once more. Like a poltergeist in the cock. I too have seen this. I too am getting flashbacks, like when people with rabies see dogs. Celegorm, remember when Queen Elizabeth visited India in 61?” 

“Your rabies analogy doesn’t work. You’ll be dead before you develop such psychological symptoms. And of course I remember. Wasn’t that when Maglor tipped his hat and winked at her as the royal convoy passed?” Celegorm asks fondly, shoving on his slippers. “What? I couldn’t help it! We’re nearly the same age! And did you see her wink back? Oh, the look on your face. Simply unforgettable. I nearly painted a portrait on the spot. Bastard, our father set himself on fucking fire for you to make eyes at the fucking queen?” 

“Would have been your first and last painting,” Maedhros sighs, glumly examining a scar on his knuckle. “This was from when I automatically hit him, right there in the crowd, remember? My hand just moved on its own, I swear. And what a wasted beating it was. Queenfucker senior just took it on the chin so casually, said he had expected to one day be punished by lesser men for his success with the fairer sex.” 

Elrond watches them take off in Celegorm’s Jeep, deciding that the two getting along over being rather mean about the brother between them is probably marginally better than the constant arguments they’d been having over the week about the aforementioned uptick of violence, which Maedhros understandably suspected Celegorm of orchestrating, and Celegorm remained characteristically evasive about. 

He drags the enormous mosquito net he’d been ordered to purchase for his mother’s benefit (out of his own pocket, mind you, Maglor having conveniently forgotten his purse when Elrond started complaining about the price and Curufin choosing that moment to wax poetic about the current exchange rate between the British pound and the Indian rupee meaning that Elrond could ‘probably buy us all and eat us for tea, like we were a selection of cheap biscuits’) up the stairs and pushes open the door to his father’s study with a foot, hoisting the tent and its poles inside with him. 

Maedhros’ study is, as it always has been for as long as Elrond could remember, anally organised, very unlike the man himself. Everything had its place, even with half the furniture dragged out to make room for the new mattress poor Fingon had to bring home tied to the roof of his car. Books in neat, precise rows, shelf after shelf of everything from novels to political treatises to, and he can’t help laughing as he takes it in, three rows of gaudy American comic books about giant flesh-eating spiders and scantily clad supervillains, which Maedhros curated with as much passion as he dedicated to everything else. 

Two large portraits hang on the wall as is common practice in Indian houses to commemorate the dead: Feanor and Nerdanel, staring out at the large terrace-window. A little box of cassette tapes, and Elrond knows each of them by-heart: Nee Maathraminnu, There is Only You, which he used to tease Fingon with after they argued, pinching his cheeks and belting out Nee Maathram-Finnu, There is Only My Finnu. Omanathingal Kidaavo, the old lullaby. And of course, Unaruvin, Uyaruvin: Awake, Arise, a Malayalam adaptation of The Internationale. 

Elrond smiles as he bends down and hoists up the mosquito-tent poles, only to dislodge yet another little box from its preordained place. This one, home to a series of little cartoon strips Maedhros and Maglor had collaborated on for the twins, where Maglor wrote the dialogue and plotted out the stories, and Maedhros drew and filled in all the pictures. 

His father could draw much better with his left hand than most people could with their right. And for a moment, the study threatens to suffocate him. Drown him in his father’s lost potential. Then, because Elrond is nothing if not a master of tragic timing, he spots the letter. 

It brushes past the corner of his eye as he moves the box of drawings to the large writing bureau, where it lay, facing upwards. Still, even though he’d been raised by Maglor, who had always found it very entertaining to read other people’s private correspondence (and had passed the habit down to Elros), Elrond is not the kind of person who reads letters not addressed to him. He only picks it up to move it aside, not tempted for a moment by his father’s unmistakably cautious left-hand penmanship or even the softness of the disconnected words he cannot help trespassing upon. 

To my dear little revolutionary, it starts. 

Elrond sits down, and reads every word. Somehow, the worst part isn’t realising that his father had kept up a secret correspondence with his daughter for a decade, though it comes somewhat close. The real worst part is that when Elrond picks the letter up to read after seeing the address, the dear little revolutionary, he does not for a moment think he’s intruding on anyone’s privacy. Elrond does not read other people’s letters. 

That is the worst part of it all, the thing he would never, ever admit to anyone else, the thing he would never admit even to himself. That he hadn’t read the letter because it was addressed to Arwen, he read it because he thought it was addressed to him. That for a few delighted seconds, he’d thought that he, Elrond, Professor of Children’s Literature and Visual Cultures at the University of Oxford and heir to a sizeable fortune, was the dear little revolutionary Maedhros had written to with such tenderness. 

The world rearranges itself after every shattering, shuffles its deck, and once again I am helpless to understand the new order of things. 

Elrond, having been a twin for the majority of his life, had always preferred to live his life by halves and doubles. He is at his best when part of a ratio: a portion of duty, a slice of pleasure, a thimbleful of regret. He likes to know where the ground ends and Elrond Peredhel begins. He dwells in memory only for however long it takes to neutralise the compulsion to return to it, to return to not-knowing things. The whole never tastes as good as the sum of its parts. When Elros died, he was very, very unhappy. The kind of unhappy that got people locked up. Then, he moved on, because that’s what people did. Yes, absolutely. He absolutely moved on.

For that world is the one in which you and I will meet at last. There, you will receive this birthday present, and all the others for the dozens of birthdays to come.

When Elros died, Cel had been away for work and Arwen was away at school, boarding as it was term-time. It was Maglor who called to tell him, five days after his brother had actually died. Fingon had to take the phone from him as Maglor had been almost entirely incoherent, so technically, it was Fingon he heard the news from. He remembers being grateful for that, at least. That it was Fingon, who spoke softly, who was kind, who stayed on the line with him for over an hour. Then, Elrond had to make the call to Elwing, and it was just as awful as he’d expected it to be. Celegorm called him a few hours later, sounding like he was on his way to commit a murder. Then Caranthir and Haleth, then Curufin and Deepika, all to give him their love. Even Finrod and his sister Galadriel had written to him. 

He did not hear from Maedhros at all. It had been so unlike him to not-call. Elrond’s relationship with his Baba had been irreversibly stretched by that point, existed in a constant state of strain, pulled taut across the world. But still, the line between them was alive, however frayed. It had never been sterile indifference between them, no, Maedhros was never the kind of man who was capable of ignoring the things that displeased him, like sons who never visited. 

He would call on every occasion he deemed fit: birthdays, Eid, Muharram, municipality elections, Christmas, Labour Day. Sometimes he’d be gruff, often short with Elrond. Other times he would lecture him about some nonsensical point or the other. Regardless, he would call without fail, send presents and cards, and regularly remind Elrond in no uncertain terms that he “has a bloody father that he clearly gives no fucks about”. 

Elrond spent that weekend smashing every reflective surface in the house, not in a rage but very precisely, like grinding spices. He’d wanted his fathers very much. But Abba couldn’t manage a word, though he sat silently on very expensive calls to keep him company. And he wouldn’t answer a thing he asked about Baba other than to say he didn’t live at the cliff-house any longer, and had moved in with Finnu full-time. So he’d called Fingon’s house, and the knot in his chest loosened when Maedhros actually picked up the phone. 

“What is it?” he’d snapped down the line. “Party business, dial the district branch office, I’m on leave. How many bloody t—” 

“Baba?” Elrond had asked. “Baba, can you hear me?”

“Are you trying to play a joke?” Maedhros snarled, raising his voice to the point Elrond had to hold the receiver away from his ear. “Are you fucking playing a joke on me, you son of a dog? How fucking dare you call this house!” 

He’d sworn then, told the caller he’d kill him with his bare hands if he ever called the house again, threatened to rip him from limb to limb. And Elrond had been confused because that sort of thing, the barefaced viciousness and the blind slurring, was far beyond Maedhros’ usual repertoire of creative, almost lyrical verbal insults. Then, cold horror. 

He thinks it’s someone pretending to be Elros. 

“No. No! It’s me. It’s Elrond,” he got out. “I’m sorry, Baba. I should have said. It’s just Elrond. I… I wanted to ask how you were holding up.” 

A stunned, ragged gasp, then the click of the line as Maedhros slammed the receiver back into its hook. Elrond wanted his fathers very, very much. He’d called again the next day. Fingon picked up this time, and had asked him, very kindly, to leave Maedhros alone for a few weeks. He’s under a great deal of strain, he’d said. I’m sorry, Elrond. He’s really… he feels responsible for it. And there are political impacts too. The Party. Russo has to step back in as president. And Elrond had sat there, staring into space at Fingon told him all about the fucking Party like that was why he’d been calling. He’d known, even then, that something hadn’t been quite right about the way Elros died. Fingon did not care too much about the Party. For him to babble about it so desperately, he must have been hiding something. 

Only fourteen you were, and you had no clue because I know your father would never have mentioned such a thing to you – that Elros' death had been added to your grandfather's charge-sheet in the minds of even those who love him. And you wrote me a letter where you told me how sorry you are, how you cannot imagine such a loss. 

You had translated for me an English book on grief, you had asked me to take some time away from the Party, you had even made a list, in your hand, a list of beautiful sites across the country that you thought I should go to, for a little while, to unshatter. Because I had lost my son too. Writing you that response, those seventeen pages, oh Arwen, it was the most alive I felt that month. 

So Maedhros had written to Arwen. 

Fourteen year old Arwen, who loved her uncle like any girl would love an uncle they saw twice a year for a couple of months at a time. Elros was very funny, and he liked her very much and they had gotten along very well, Arwen having been as sporty as he had been and as equally fed-up with Elrond’s general incompetence around bats and rackets. She had been upset, of course she had. Celebrían had driven to her school the weekend after to tell her, and she’d been upset, yes, she’d cried when she called him afterwards, because Elrond didn’t go along on the drive. 

Elrond didn’t go on the drive because by that point he’d lost almost a stone in six days, and the sight of her father in that state, out of his mind, feet never touching the floor, would have worried Arwen far, far more than a dead uncle. It had been all Celebrían could do to drag him out of bed every afternoon, and he’d half wasted away across weeks on end. Maglor called him every evening, and Elwing every morning. Gil-galad had gone up to the head of Elrond’s department at Oxford and openly bullied him into signing him off onto a sabbatical. Celegorm, fucking Celegorm, who generally exhibited less empathy than a common mongoose, began phoning him once a week. Fingon sent weekly telegrams. 

And Maedhros wrote to Arwen. Maedhros wrote a seventeen-page letter to Arwen. And writing it made him feel the most alive I felt that month.

Elrond should not feel jealous of a dead teenager. He knows this. No man should ever come to a point in his life where he is made to feel jealous of dead teenagers, let alone when the dead teenager in question is his own daughter. But he is jealous. He stares at himself in the shuttered window, no other mirror in the room because Maedhros hates mirrors. Twins, he tells himself. In the glass, it comes out like a snarl, a word with teeth. A red word, a hiss, and in the window it makes no sound. Elros’ silent reflection, Arwen’s silent father. Monkey in the middle, he thinks wildly, and laughs. 

Elros had always, always been a part of Elrond. And so, the way Elrond lost him had paralleled the way in which one’s body forgets parts of itself. A tooth, loosening for days before the final pull. A scent, fading from a wrist. Ruptures and extractions. And then an ossification into bone brittle memory, always primed for the shattering, ready made rounds of shrapnel. When he died, Elrond had been very, very unhappy. He had been the kind of unhappy that got people locked up. 

“Elrond, give me a hand, this bloody thing is…” Maglor walks into the study, dragging in a heavy teak tea table, only to come face to face with the awful starkness on his son’s face. His heart thuds, certain that something awful has happened, because this was how Elrond had looked when he first arrived, milk-white and nauseous, all the colour within him erased. Could the wonders of half a year unhappen in a day? 

“What happened? Hey. Look at me, boy. What is it?” His eyes rove across the desk. The letter, opened. The wonders of half a year, then, have unhappened. 

“Shit. Shit, shit. I’m sorry, Elrond. Sit down,” Maglor drops the table, picks at a nail driven into the wall from one of his brother’s attempts at doing something he doesn’t actually want to know about. “I’m sorry. I had to mess around in that drawer when ikka asked me to send… never mind. Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you saw that.” 

“Did you know?” Elrond asks, running a fingernail along the outside of the letter, never actually touching the paper. “Please tell me if you did. I won’t be angry. Do you know how long this went on?” 

“No! No, no Elrond, I didn’t. I didn’t. I only knew last week, when ikka told me. I don’t think anyone knew, even Finnu. Ten years, he said. And… she never told you? Arwen, I mean.” 

Elrond shakes his head, then offers a short laugh. “Ten years, she’d have been at school most of the time. And, well. I don’t read other people’s letters.” 

“Are you angry with him, Elrond?” Maglor stops picking at the nail, walks further into the room and shuts the door behind him, quietly.

“Are you going to make excuses for him?” Elrond raises his eyebrows, folding his arms across his chest. “Because you don’t have to. You’ve given me the spiel more than a few times, I remember. But I’m not angry with him.” 

He isn’t. His father has hurt him, and Elrond is hurt. Not in the way he thought he might be, but he is. But envy is not as urgent as anger. It settles like silt in deep water until it is indistinguishable from the other layers of inadequacy that began sinking into him all those years ago, from the moment Elros returned to India and Elrond did not. 

But he isn’t angry with Maedhros. There had never been a version of their lives in which harm did not pass between the two of them; some hurts are certain, if not through intention then inheritance. Maedhros could only give what he had, and only to the hand that reached out. That he understands. Elrond, like his father, has learned to live with things not given. They take what they can get, and pretend they do not need or want more. 

“Then why do you look so unhappy?”

“I was thinking about Elros,” he croaks. Takes a deep breath, and turns away from the pale ghost in the faded glass of the window. “Just now, I mean. I started thinking about him, out of the blue.” 

“Why?” Maglor face softens, as it always does when Elros is mentioned. 

His Elros, yes, yes, Elrond knows and so does Maglor. Abba’s Elros and Baba’s Elrond, like it always has been. When he returned, though he had written and called and made all these extensive plans, Maglor still could not stop that splitsecond Elros! My Elros, at my door at last! from making a momentary appearance in his eyes. 

“Because he was my twin, Abba,” he says shortly, sinking down into the desk chair. He feels exasperated and tight at the seams, like someone’s sanded down all his corners, like a child has spent all day clinging to his shoulders, asking him to name everything it sees, wide-eyed in wonder. “He was my Elros too. He was my Elros first. I was so… undone. Remember how when we were children, I used to copy everything he did?”

Maglor gives him a tired smile. “Of course I remember. Funniest moment of my life was when you were both seven, and you and Elros brought home 25 marks in your maths test. I had been so confused, because Elros didn’t have two braincells to rub together when it came to maths, but it had been your favourite subject at the time. And when I asked what happened, you said you actually knew all the answers, but copied Elros anyway.” 

“I never stopped doing that,” Elrond leans back, closing his eyes. “Never. Not even when I stayed with mum, and he returned here. I was still doing what he did. Just differently, just silently. He was captain, I was cargo. I lived with him inside me for so long that I stopped noticing just how much of me was built up around… when he died, Abba, it was as though the ground itself had given way. Like there was no more scaffolding to hold me up.” 

“I’m sorry, Elrond,” Maglor sinks down onto the mattress, crossing his legs under him. “We should have called you home then. We’d just been… ikka made me swear, and Finnu, he begged me. They asked me to swear I wouldn’t tell you, that I wouldn’t hurt you with the knowledge of what truly happened to Elros.”

“I understand. Of course I understand that. But you could have asked me to come home,” Elrond looks at the letter again. Seventeen pages, it says. Seventeen pages, and none for you. 

“He was my twin. And there I was, thousands of miles away, and all I could do was send a cheque. Yet that too, you… Baba, he put it to the fire, didn’t he?”

Maglor nods. “He did. I make no excuses for how he behaved then.  How he behaves now. He should not have done that. He should have spoken with you, not only then, but when your Arwen…” 

“You know, the body is this… remarkable thing,” Elrond ignores the mention of Arwen, and smiles at his father, the same smile he’d given himself in the window, the gets-people-locked-up one. “When… I used to just. Go to lectures at university. Biology, chemistry, whatever, no matter how awful I was at the subject, just so I had something to do, without Elros there to fill every minute with his yapping. And there was a certain lecture. I don’t remember what it was about, really, something-something the innate capability of the human body. Frankly, most of it was nonsense. But there was this moment when the lecturer said bodies talk in tremors. And I sorted it away as a stupid, chewy phrase. Waffle. Nonsense. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

Maglor, the poet, rolls his eyes, but nods anyway. “Elrond, please. Speak slowly. You’re getting worked up.” 

“Am I? Fine. Fine. This is slow enough, isn’t it? Right. Right. I sorted it away, this clever little phrase. Then Elros died. You told me… you told me only five days after. But I could sense it, even before you called, you know? That something was wrong,” Elrond shudders, gasps for breath. “That something was wrong. I knew that something was wrong.” 

“Like something has torn loose, and I just… I didn’t know what it was. Or how. But I woke up, gasping for breath, unable to breathe through both nose and mouth. I thought it was fucking hay fever. You know that? I thought it was hay fever, that the pollen count had gone up in the day. God, Abba, it wasn’t that though, was it? It was Elros, who couldn’t breathe. And ever since then, all my breaths have mistimed because I… tremors, isn’t it? Our bodies speak in tremors. Some days I trip over my own feet, suddenly unbalanced. If I’m not paying attention when walking, always I drift to the left. Talk in tremors! A nonsense phrase, but it was all that I could think of, ever since then. To this day. You knew. Baba knew. Mum knew and god, even Arwen knew more than I did. All of you knew what had happened to my twin, and there I was like a fucking idiot, trying to interpret fucking tremors.”

Elrond stares at him for a moment, blinking. Then, he rushes out of the room and into the lavatory, heaving. The door slams shut.

Elrond and his seasick, anxious stomach had always been one of their favourite little nurture–not–just–nature jokes, because it was a trait he shared with Maedhros (in whom such traits were rather more surprising). But perhaps it isn’t genetics. Not congenital, but contagious. Perhaps Elrond hadn’t escaped after all, like Maglor thought he had. 

His son is throwing up his guts in the lavatory and Maglor is rooted to his chair, fixated upon the unavoidable familiarity of the sound. The knowledge that there is no escape, and that the moment of return hadn’t cured his son of anything. That Elrond’s prolonged absence did not absolve him of his unasked-for collision with Fëanor’s legacy, that some things are terminal from the moment of first contact. That his son isn’t some transplanted blossom flourishing in its native soil, but part of a lightning-struck tree torn in two, the upright half rotting away at the split. 

Elrond stumbles back into the study, washes his face at the sink in the corner. And then wheels around to face Maglor, looking just as sick as he had ten minutes ago. 

“Why did you send us back?” he snarls, breathless. “When we were seventeen. You told us Mum asked for you to send us back, but she didn’t. She just asked to come see us, have us visit, what, a few months each year? Go to school there, university, whatever. But you told her to take us and have us live with her. Why? Why would you ever do that?”

Maglor pales. He had expected to talk about Maedhros and Arwen. Offer comfort, hand over a shoulder, perhaps show him the little box of gold again. This is not that. This is excoriation. “Elrond. Please. Don’t bring all that back up now. The house is full, everyone’s here. If this gets back to your Baba…” 

“What do you mean if this gets back to him? Doesn’t he know? I’m sure he doesn’t think Elros and I just upped and fucking left. How many fucking secrets are you all keeping from each other?” 

“He knows now, but the circumstances of him finding out…” Maglor winces, reflexively rubbing a spot on his jaw. “It happened later. Long after Elros’ return, a few months after your Baba was released. And it wasn’t pretty. I’ll tell you that. Elros and your Baba were having a terrible argument, and I got in between them, and it came out then. And she agreed too, Elrond. Your mother agreed with me. It wasn’t as though I was… I told Elwing my reasoning. Why I… she agreed. She said that if I wished it, then she would take you, no questions asked.” 

“I don’t care. And so, Elros knows, does he? Knew. I meant knew, of course I did,” Elrond swallows hard, looking as though he’d be sick again. “Tell me now, or I’ll ask Baba.” 

Elrond has grown familiar with the ache of standing just beyond reach, with being the second light in a shared sky. He has asked for so little, all his life. For love to be a certainty, not a series of questions he’s fated to repeat over and over and over. Am I enough? Am I whole? Yes, but no. Elros’ half-erased twin brother, who didn’t return. From whom it was ever so easy to keep secrets. 

“Are you feeling all right?” Maglor gestures at his son’s sweaty face. “Does this happen a lot, then, in England?” 

“Stop trying to change the subject,” Elrond snaps. “I’m fine. I’m asking you to explain.” 

“I’m not changing the subject. I’m asking you if you get these… bouts of sickness often, back in England. Nausea, all that.” 

Elrond shakes his head. “No. No, it’s just a stress thing, you know it is. For a while, after Elros died, it was bad… and when I was out looking… when I was out looking for Arwen, I… lost my head a little. Then too. But no, it’s not exactly anything chronic.”

Maglor nods, as if Elrond had confirmed a hypothesis, and explains before his son gets even more frustrated. “You might not remember. But when you were here, allah mian, it was such a constant. Bloody pain in my arse. When you were a child, when you were a teenager even, these… I used to think perhaps some food, perhaps the water, didn’t agree with you, that it was mechanical. Perhaps some allergy, or even something like asthma, some condition you develop. But no. I knew it. I knew it, Elrond.”

“Knew what?” 

“What I realised, when years went by and you didn’t return. When you gave excuse after excuse after excuse. When you, who spent all your life copying your brother, who loved this place as much as he did, did not return even once. I knew it then,” Maglor insists. “That I was right to have sent you back like I did. You, at least. Not Elros, I know now, Elwing and I know that now, but you. You, I was right to have sent away. Because you sensed it in him in a way Elros didn’t. Didn’t you? You sensed it in Maedhros, didn’t you?”  

Elrond says nothing. He looks like someone bracing for a blow. To his father, it is a familiar sight. 

“You were already afraid, weren’t you?” Maglor asks, though he doesn’t wait for Elrond to answer. “Back then, I mean. Even as a child. You were afraid, even though you couldn’t ever say why.” 

Elrond shifts his weight from foot to foot. His silences grow younger. “I was… no. No, Abba, don’t do this. That’s not right, don’t make it about… what? Fear? Foresight? It’s nothing like that. I was never afraid of Baba. Never. He wasn’t like that with us, you can’t just claim I was afraid.”

“I never said you were,” Maglor’s lips tremble. “But I was, Elrond. I was. Not of your father. But I was afraid.” 

“What are you saying? What are you accusing me of? That I saw him? Saw what? That he would lose his fucking mind after his son died and break down half the house? That he’d write to my dead daughter one day? Is this some fucking superstition that you’re—“

“No. I said you felt him. I didn’t say you guessed it, I never said you’re some precocious prophet from the hills. I said you felt it, you breached his walls in a way it took me years to do, because he let you. You felt it in every time he’d talk about your probable weddings, or… what you both would do when you grew up. You know what I mean, Elrond. I know you do.” 

“What?” Elrond asks, though he knows. The way Maedhros speaks about the future as though it belongs to everyone aside from him. My Elrond will write a book. My Elros will become the Prime Minister. Elladan will be a pilot, and Elrohir’s paintings will hang in galleries. And Arwen, my little revolutionary, will outlive us all. 

What about you, Baba? What will you do then?

“You were too porous for your own good, Elrond.”

“And so you sent me away. You sent me away because you thought I could sense that Baba was unhappy. Is that it?” 

“You know that’s not all there is to it,” Maglor says quietly. He crosses his arms, fingers flexing uselessly on his elbows. “If his unhappiness was all there was to it, then why didn’t you come home?”

“But why then? Why would you do it then, without telling either of us? Without telling Baba too?” Elrond’s voice breaks. He moves towards Maglor at last, sits on the bare mattress beside him. Outside the window, the azan, the call to prayer begins, long low notes twisting over rooftops and smoke, as indifferent as the wind. Maglor taps his foot, rubs his temples. Feanor stares at them from the wall. “How could you send us away without telling us why? Abba, even you have to admit. Even you have to admit it was cruel to do such a thing. Why would you not tell us why?” 

“Because I wanted to fuck your life up when you were seventeen, Elrond! Because I thought it’s a funny thing to do! Because I threw a fucking party the day after you left because Allah mian, I was waiting to get rid of you for fifteen years!” Maglor snaps, rising up and breathing heavily. “Because I am wrong and hateful, and I am cruel. Because I wanted to send you away and part you from your beloved Baba! Is that what you wish to hear?”

Then, he sits back down. Buries his head in his hands, breathing deeply. Elrond cannot help but think of the last time he’d seen Maglor, when they were being sent back. The metallic clink of the airport gate shutting behind them, and through its bars, Maglor’s terrible, false brave-face grin crumpling into a silent scream. Elrond leans into him, presses sorry into his shoulder. 

Maglor apologises too then, voice thickening. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Elrond. I’ve been doing this for so long. I didn’t expect to have this out today. I’m sorry. It is difficult to say. It is. I am willing to take the blame, but… not everything can be made transparent. Not everything can be put into writing.” 

He continues, though it’s muffled by his fingers. “I sent you away then because that was when your mother wrote to me, asking to see you. And yes, you’re right. Asking if you could… come to England for a few months. Maybe finish your schooling there. We were in her debt, of course we were, and I would have allowed it, as much as I would miss you both. It would have been the right thing to do, the least we could do, considering ikka didn’t just organise that crowd charge but took her bloody children to boot. It would only have been good for you, schooling in England, meeting your mother, and still getting to come home to us. Yes, I could have done that. That’s the easy answer.”

“And the hard one?”

“The hard one is this. I went to your father’s trial. I went to ikka’s trial for the terrorism charge. The day after that, I wrote to your mother, and begged her to take you both for good, and keep you there. And that woman, Elwing, though we wronged her ever so much, understood what I was asking her, and why. And she agreed to take you for good despite how much you would have hated such a permanent separation. Despite the fact that it would make you both behave badly with her, that the loss would mar your reunion. She agreed because, god. She’s your mother. Of course she agreed. And so it was decided. Elwing and I agreed that we would be the villains of your displacement. That’s the hard answer.” 

“What happened at the trial? Was this the big one, the trial we weren’t allowed to go to?” Elrond asks, placing a hand on Maglor’s shoulder because he looked like he was about to be ill. “In Delhi wasn’t it? What happened in Delhi that… that changed your mind? You’re not telling me you sent us away like that because he copped a terror charge? He was young, it wasn’t exactly some enormous act of violence, was it? The man he threw the bomb at lost a fucking finger. You sent us away because he’s a terrorist?”

“No, not because he’s a terrorist, Elrond, half this family are terrorists in some shape or form. Even Curufin, even if in a pathetic way,” Maglor raises his head again, drying his eyes. He reaches up to Elrond’s hand on his shoulder, twining their fingers together. “Not because he’s a terrorist. Ikka could have easily slipped out of the terror-charge, considering the only injured party was, technically speaking, a colonial officer. He could have gotten out of it in two seconds. Any lawyer could have gotten him out of it in two fucking seconds, Elrond.” 

“But Baba refused a lawyer, didn’t he?” Elrond remembers. “I think he and Fingon-uncle had an argument about it. Fingon wanted his family to… pay for the lawyer, and Baba refused.” 

Which had been fine with Maglor. The only thing Maedhros despised more than charity was religious charity, and the only thing he despised more than religious charity was Fingon’s father, the wealthy vicar who bought his son a house to keep his deviance away from his younger siblings. He could even understand his refusing a lawyer: Maedhros had a tendency to think he could talk his way out of anything. Which, most of the time, he could. So Maglor and Fingon, though they were irritated and worried by the refusal, had thought he would hold his own. They had not thought that Maedhros, who was so good at talking his way out of things, was equally good at talking his way into things when the mood struck him.

“He refused. And when he stood trial, I realised why he did such a thing. Because my dear brother stood up on his second day in court, and started reciting al-Fatiha aloud. Without prompting, for no reason at all.” 

Elrond blinks. “The… prayer? What, he started chanting allahu akbar? But Baba isn’t religious. Was he trying to swear on the Quran or something?”

“Of course he wasn’t. He’s the furthest thing from religious, let alone being a fundamentalist who starts chanting in a courtroom, boy. Anyone who knows anything about either Islam or your father would know that he’s blasphemy with legs. Forget Allah, any local imam who isn’t as insane as Bilbo would kick beloved Mohammad Razul bin Faraz out on his arse, and he’d deserve it. But this was a central court, in Delhi. He had to speak English.”

“And because this had escalated to the central court, because the damned English papers published that bloody photo of him beating himself at the ratheeb so they were calling him some kind of fundamentalist, because the first war with Pakistan had just finished and because the charge related to national security… they were playing up that angle, the prosecution. Especially because the only reason they’d dragged him in anyway was because he and the Marxists were pissing off the central government, agitating to secede from the union.” 

Maedhros did indeed have to speak English in the courtroom, and it was as if Eid had come early for him because as unpolished as he was with the language, it was where he could be his most theatrical. And he had performed his best. He’d stood up on the table, raised his arms, started chanting—and not even in Malayalam. 

“Then, Elrond, he went on a rant about Allah appearing to him, telling him to strike the officer down,” Maglor’s lips tighten, his hand clenches on Elrond’s. “Started raving like a madman, pacing up and down the table. Jihad, ya Allah, jihad! He put on the show of a lifetime. Rolling his eyes to their whites, chanting some damned Urdu poem he picked up somewhere about demons and devils, the holy war. The fucking holy war!”

“To this day, I can hear him, Elrond. Throwing his hands in the air, jihad, ya Allah, jihad over and over again. Bastard forgot Finnu and I would be there, you see, because the viewing gallery was so high up, he couldn’t actually see us. He forgot we’d be there, Finnu and I, that we’d know exactly what he was doing. What he was trying to do. They called him a terrorist, and he saw his bloody chance.” 

“After the war with Pakistan, it would… that he chose Urdu…” Elrond says weakly. “Oh, Abba. He didn’t. He didn’t.” 

“He was standing there, and only when he turned did I see his eyes. He wasn’t unafraid and defiant or, fuck, even stubborn. He was laughing, like he wasn’t there at all. He had this sick, hysterical hope in his eyes, as if he was praying that the courtroom would put him out of his misery if he could prove he was monstrous enough. The crowd muttering about how terrifying he looked, because you know Maedhros can look fucking unhinged when he wants to. My brother, pacing around and screaming about jihad. Finnu sitting beside me, keening like we were at a funeral. It was like watching someone dive off a cliff right before me.”

“He was going for the…” Elrond presses his hands tight across his face. “Capital punishment. That’s what he was after, wasn’t he?” 

“I didn’t know what to do—I felt… I felt helpless. But Finnu, he pulled himself together, went straight out and called home to Kerala,” Maglor continues, shaking his head at the memory. “Begged his father to send him his share of the inheritance early so he could pay for a lawyer. Finnu swore he would not turn up at his sister’s wedding, poor bastard, if he would lend him that money, and that offer was so good that his father just wired it to him immediately with no other terms aside from that. No going back from what your Baba pulled, of course not, it was mostly for damage control. But it worked. Gallows to twenty, twenty to ten. I’m sure your Baba wept when they told him that.” 

“And even afterwards, Finnu moved hell and high water for four years, went to half the damn courts in this country and petitioned judge after judge, got his brother—Turgon, the one in the IAS—to pull a bunch of strings. He paid off the Central Jail wardens to file reports that Maedhros was causing trouble behind bars and turned half the prison into such a political bloodbath (which wasn’t a lie because he had indeed been arranging minor riots in the way most people took up knitting) that it was too much trouble to keep him inside. Until finally, your Baba was released before serving even half his sentence.”

Maglor squeezes his eyes shut, waits for his chin to stop trembling before he heaves in a breath. He clears his throat again, fruitlessly as his voice continues to crack. “And all I could do was think of you both. How you spent your lives watching him recede, just how I spent mine, fearing that the tide would rush back in and smash everything to bits. What could I have done, Elrond? I’d thought… I’d thought such desires had left him. My mother had seen it, when he came home from the hospital after throwing that bomb, missing a hand. The best cricketer in these parts, he’d been, but somehow his hand stilled in that moment. And my mother’s face, Elrond. She tore up my father’s study that evening. Smashed every little thing that remained of him. He’s killed my son, she said, over and over.”  

“And I couldn’t make you live like that, because I saw that you saw it too. Because it could be anything: a car accident, a political clash, police violence, whatever. Whatever it is, I realised you would know why it happened. Because you knew him. You knew him so well you were made ill by his thoughts, over and over again. And I love my brother, and I can never judge him for the way he thinks of himself and the world. But you were so young, ever so promising, and I couldn’t watch you watch him. And these twins… they’re so, so young, Elrond. Your mother was so young. Elros was too young. And all of them, dragged into this… oh, don’t make me say it outright, Elrond. Tell me you know. Tell me you’ve always known.” 

As said before, Elrond likes to know where the ground ends and Elrond Peredhel begins. Very little is certain in the life of a Peredhel twin, so it’s an understandable quirk. The few sureties he does have, like where he was born and who swore what happened when, he ends up keeping behind glass windows, labelled like innards after an autopsy: femur (borrowed), jaw (split), heart (eh?). He was born in 1935, and his brother was born six minutes after him. The India Office Records in Blackfriars say it was thirty eight degrees that afternoon. Next to the entry, an empty cabinet which once housed the knowledge that Elros had boasted an extra little-toe between the ages of three and seven, though he took it off display after he remembered nobody actually knew what happened to it and that Maedhros had probably (though not certainly) been lying when he told them he got peckish one evening and mistook it for a peanut. 

Elrond’s favourite part of every museum visit had always been the jingle of keys on the curator’s belt. No locksmiths allowed. Elwing told him that when he was seventeen months old, the Viceroy of India called him a sickly-looking creature. Maglor told him that when he was six, Abdul-khader of Puthiyangadi Bakery took one look at him over the counter, shook his head sadly, said “poor bastard”, and refused to elaborate. And all these were only the small exhibits leading up to his prize certainty, the home truth all the more valuable for its unassailable solidity, for its constant presence through his life.

Elrond Peredhel had never known a Maedhros Feanorian who wished to live. 

“I know,” he admits in a whisper, and clutches his father’s hand even tighter. “Always, Abba. I’ve always known.” 

Maglor exhales raggedly, relief slackening his spine, and buries his face in Elrond’s shoulder, tears hot on his neck. All the things Elrond wanted to say to Maglor, carefully rehearsed and turned over-and-over in his mind like smooth stones: questions, accountings, accusations, flee at the weight on his shoulder. 

All he can manage is a nod, and sarilla, in Malayalam, a word that dances between ‘it’s all right’, and ‘let it be’ and ‘I understand’ and refuses to settle on one. A dull recognition of the compulsion the two of them shared: to smooth the jagged ends of things to show you care, translate hurt into reason and carry the weight of the world because not doing so means confronting the unspeakable. And so, they say nothing at all for a very long time. The silence is comforting, in its way. 

From ‘The Statue Drowners’ by Elrond Peredhel, translated from the Malayalam

A father who sends his children away does not necessarily do them a cruelty, and neither does he lie. Rather, there are things he does not say, and then, over time, no longer knows how to say, or when. The act calcifies. The silence becomes sediment. A moment of rupture becomes an atmosphere. A forgetting not of event, but of language.

The child inherits the atmosphere. The shape of his dislocation is embedded in a decision he was never told about. He feels its pressure without knowing its origin. Protection turns into estrangement. All based on the belief that doing the difficult thing for someone’s own good will one day be vindicated. Protection justifies absence. But the fantasy exhausts itself before it can deliver on its promise. What remains is affective residue: a rupture in the narrative. 

In this way, the child becomes the medium of his parents’ silence. He carries unspeakable things, sometimes unknowingly, into his own choices. He finds himself repeating patterns he doesn’t have the words to understand. Fleeing intimacy. Mourning things he never possessed. I do not know if this is my story, or that of my father Maedhros, the terrorist. Whom others see as having failed at life: at fatherhood, at personhood, at grandparenthood. Who looks in the mirror and sees a sixteen-year-old boy whose Baba set himself on fire, and made him watch in the hopes that one day, he would do the same. 

To inherit a story is to inherit the silence it sits within. Before my father ever had the chance to fail at fatherhood, he threw a homemade bomb at a British colonial officer, who had been kettling a crowd on their way to market. That single moment turned him into two things at once: a failed suicide bomber, and thus, a failed son. 

Elrond writes for so long into the night that he doesn’t actually hear Maedhros coming up to the cliff-house from the gate until he actually crests into his field of vision. It’s the shadow he sees first, slanting across the verandah, and when he looks up, his father giving him a mock salute with blood streaking across his temple and chin.

“Hey, what is it? Elrond?” Maedhros whistles at him as if he’s the one bleeding all over the porch, kicking off his slippers. “Are you feeling sick? Your face, boy! It looks like you’re dropping dead in five minutes.”

He smiles wanly. “I’m all right, Baba. I just needed some air. Thought I’d sleep out here tonight.” 

“Shut it, sisterfucker. I know your face like a book. What is it? Tell me, or right here I will sit, all night. Every one minute, on the dot, I will ask you what’s wrong. Ten minutes it’ll take for you to tell me. Ask Finnu if you don’t believe I’ll do that, even he caves in ten minutes maximum. Hey. Listen. You got some bad news?” 

“Nothing I haven’t known, apparently,” Elrond tries to make light of it, before taking in his father’s appearance properly. He’d clearly been involved in some sort of violence, his knuckles barely scabbing over. He’s sweating, even though the night is chilly, and there’s blood all over his mouth. 

“Your nose is bleeding all over the place,” he points out, wincing at the sight. “It’s in your teeth. Urgh. The hell have you gotten yourself up to, Baba? It’s eleven at night!”

“Oh, I happened to run into one of Finrod’s dogfuckers sticking election bills,” Maedhros grabs a discarded spoon from the ground, baring his teeth at it to check whether Elrond was right, rattling on. “Do you know why there’s a fucking spoon here? Twins, I assume. Like magpies. My second least favourite bird. After parrots. Unnatural little shits. Now, like I was saying. That dogfucker was sticking up an election bill. And of course, I see him, twenty five years old, something like that. I tell him to fuck right off before I use his teeth to play marbles.”

“What a poet you are,” Elrond can’t help laughing. “Did he not fuck off, then?”

“No! Motherfucker swung for me,” Maedhros shakes his head, still disbelieving that someone actually dared. “I knew that violence was on the rise, though god fucking knows why and frankly I want to fucking slap Celegorm to hell and back because I do not understand why the fuck my bloody strategist is encouraging this uptick of battering, even though we have this victory easily in the bag. Sorry. Got distracted. So, this walking nutsack actually swung for me.”

“Right, and that’s why you’re bleeding?” 

“Fuck that, of course it isn’t. You think some two-paise college-hero cocksucker could get the better of me?” Maedhros actually looks offended, bunching up the hem of his shirt and pressing it to his nose to stem the bleeding. “But look, the little shit actually dared to swing at me, was quite impressive. I wanted to give him a… reward for his bravery. Asshole-vir Chakra, military honour for brave assholes. All I did was hold him over a bridge for a short while, enjoying him hollering to hell and back.” 

“And you just… enjoyed yourself so much you spontaneously popped a vein in your nose?”

“Oh, no,” Maedhros’ smile turns feverish, and his hand drums unconsciously on his thigh. It’s his talking-to-fill-the-silence face, Elrond knows. “He said something to me that I didn’t like. And I lost it. Battered him to a pulp. Bill-fucker’s brothers were around, and there were three. Half my age, the bastards. Gave them hell too, but sadly caught a few myself. I don’t remember too much of it, but believe me when I say at least five things broken between the four of them.” 

“For fuck’s sake, Baba, couldn’t you have let Celegorm ha—“

“Elrond,” Maedhros turns cold in a moment, widening his eyes. “Not a word.” 

And then he winks, glare dissipating as he brings up his shirt again to dab at his face. He groans melodramatically. “Fucking hell. I’m dead now. Your father is a dead man.” 

Elrond blinks, smiling despite the odd back-and-forth behaviour, unsure whether he’s amused by the exaggerated lament or the irony of your father is a dead man. “Bleeding to death, are you?” 

“Worse. This is Maglor’s shirt I borrowed, because bloody Haleth-sahiba was there this morning so I couldn’t get your uncles to do my ironing. The sitarfucker’s going to kill me when he sees this. Already he’d given me an earful about laundry. You know, I even took the damn thing off when getting into it with that asshole, see what I get for being careful.”

He pulls it off again, sighing, and shoves it at Elrond. “Go run this under the backyard tap, cold water. If it stains after that, we can say Celegorm’s Dobermann shat on it. Now, come round to the back,” Maedhros jumps back off the platform, waving him over to the narrow alley leading to the well. “Three buckets. No, four. I’m sweating like a dog and Finnu will take another vow of silence and nail himself to the cross for three-four days if I go crawl in beside him like this. Plus, I have poor billfucker all over my knuckles and I refuse to catch whatever disease he has, not this close to the election. How’s this? You don’t have to heat the buckets because I feel sorry for you and your sad little face.”

“Your idea of comfort is making me draw your bathwater?” Elrond snorts. There is, however, a comfort in the way it asks nothing new of him, and how he can sit quietly as his father talks at him, his babbling just as compulsive as Elrond’s silence. At least, until Maedhros calls out get your lazy arse up on the terrace and grab me one of your fancy Turkish towels, and he has to navigate the slippery back-stairs up to the terrace. Still, he is floating slightly above himself even so, when they return to the porch, Maedhros giving his wet hair a swift, somewhat lazy towelling. Elrond points it out, and Maedhros sticks his finger up at him, tells him his bathwater-drawing was so inefficient that there wasn’t much to dry anyway. He’s still not entirely within his own body as he watches his father pace up and down the porch to wind down before turning in.

Most photographs of Elrond’s father resemble courtroom sketches: lines drawn in haste, smudged in the retelling and coiled like wire around the man. Green eyes and black brows. Furious, both. Over the firm, tender set of his jaw. Perhaps a passing glint of tooth familiar only to those who knew his grin: the bit of bone truth embedded even in newsprint. There is reason behind such swift, shoddy reconstructions. For if you stand long enough in the company of things you were taught to fear, they may soon stop flickering at the edges. Even if they’re strangers. Stand a little longer, and you may even start asking questions. Where did the flame begin? Who struck the match, and who was made to watch? Where are the exit wounds? Where are the exit wounds? 

Elrond just could not take his eye off that tooth back then, looking at the newsprint. And here too, now too, Maedhros on the porch now, wet hair snaking down his back, looking over his shoulder and muttering about fucking bathwater. Then grinning at his own joke. Another flash of teeth, and he’s laughing. It’s as feverish as it was when he was telling Elrond about beating the bill-sticker. The world seems briefly imbalanced. Someone, somewhere, must have felt it, a butterfly in London, perhaps, has dropped dead. 

Still. How radiant it all feels under this starless sky, he and his father laughing at a stupid joke about bathwater. Like he had never left at all. There must have been a moment when Elros’ lungs clenched around nothing, trying to cling on to that last, sorely missed breath. As once a mirrored lake tries to hold the image of a falling bird, Elros must have wanted his body to hold, to restore itself, laughter and light, all of it rising again from the silence. A radiant life, extinguished. 

He feels tears rise in his eyes and turns away. Maedhros grabs his shoulder. “Arwen?” He asks quietly. Elrond blinks hard. Yes, he wants to say. Yes. Arwen, and you. 

He shakes his head instead, sitting back down on the platform. “Elros. But don’t ask me anything else, Baba. I don’t think I’ll say the right things tonight.”

“I see. All right. Yes, I see. Fine, you can be quiet as a dead mouse. We’ll sweep you up in the morning, feed you to your mother’s cat. But for now, move over, Queen Victoria,” Maedhros snatches a pillow from Elrond’s Maglor-curated selection, unceremoniously dumping a pile of his books onto the floor and clearing a space beside him. “I’m a man, not a needle.”

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Is sleeping illegal in England? Is that why you all came beating and killing people everywhere? Because you were cranky and sleep-deprived?” he crosses his arms combatively. “You’re telling me all this trouble would have never happened if you fuckers discovered afternoon naps?”

“No, I mean what are you sleeping here for?” Elrond laughs, though he passes him a second pillow. “Fingon’s inside, in your room. It’s cold tonight and your hair is wet, you’ll freeze out here.”

“Out here, out there, shut it, it’s cold only when I say it’s cold,” Maedhros argues reflexively. “Who are you to command where and when I should or shouldn’t freeze? Do I look like a fucking ice cube to you?”

“Fine, fine, sorry, I forgot your revolutionary fire will keep you warm inside,” Elrond raises his hands in surrender, then notices his father nodding appreciatively. “I was being sarcastic, it’s not a compliment. But still, at least wear a shirt or sweater or something, for god’s sake.”

“I will take fashion advice from you only when you spend three full days without walking through the house in your bloody boxers, as if everyone here is queuing to see your arse,” Maedhros reminds him crudely, impatiently sucking his teeth as Elrond gets up, retrieves a towel and starts vigorously drying his father’s hair. “What's all this? Four-five months back with Maglor and you’ve turned into a fucking woman chicken, hm?”

“Hen.”

“Fuck your hen,” Maedhros retorts automatically, before stretching obnoxiously, cracking his toes. “Only perk of you being built like a bloody beanpole is that we can still fit on one of these together, tight squash as it is. But I’ll tell you one thing that has changed. I have developed, in my middle age, a severe condition that flares up at night.” 

“Which is…?” 

“When someone so much as nudges me in my sleep, I end up kicking their head in and throwing them down the well to drown. All without waking up. So make sure you keep your elbows to yourself.”

“You really don’t have to do this, you know,” Elrond says, sitting down himself and staring at the vacant sky. “I know what you’re doing, and why. And you don’t have to. I’m fine out here, Baba.”

He knows what Maedhros is doing. He knows what Maedhros is doing because this is what his father always does. Elrond recognises the manic glittering of his eyes, the ceaseless jokes, crackling, cutting chatter, frantic and desperate to cheer him up. It’s ironic, supposes Elrond. There is some comedy to it. Fëanor had set himself on fire in a way which meant nobody could look away from him, not even his firstborn son. 

And because of that, his firstborn son became someone whose immolation people could not only watch without flinching but find themselves captivated by, fixated on how-beautiful-the-blaze. It is always the same, Elrond knows. Even him. Even Arwen. People recoil from Maedhros Fëanorian in life but return to him for stories and memories and songs, over and over, hungry for the spectacle he makes, the comfort he brings. Compulsively consumed, walking proof that public suffering belonged only to certain kinds of men, and that watching it was not only safe, but satisfying. If this man who lives this life can be so tender even in darkness, then perhaps not all is lost. 

I had the key, you see, the way to carry darkness without letting it swallow you whole, how to carry it close without being crushed by its weight .

He has spent so many years carefully juxtaposing my Baba with the terrorist that even the slightest featherweight could upset that balance. It weighed radicalism against rationalism, the understanding that though such violence was yes, wrong, bad, yes, the plight of the nation was such that a sixteen year old boy throwing a hand grenade was not only excusable but romantic. My Baba, the suicide bomber, though. That one is an impossible body, tied to no specific time nor place, only a desperation so totalising it transcends any possible narrative. One that haunts every life around him in the form of excess: loudest in his laughter and anger, the deepest depths of sadness, the highest, most dizzying peaks of joy. 

 “Shut it,” Maedhros yawns, shoving at him lightly as he sat back, leaning against the pillars. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m not in the habit of doing people favours. It’s just that Finnu will throw a fit and bite my ear off if I go crawl into bed with him this late when he has to teach early tomorrow… something-something my personal commitment to making him late. And I’m on thin ice after messing with his car horn. I’m not doing you a favour, I’m doing me a favour.” 

“I see,” Elrond nods. “And was it you doing yourself a favour, then? All these times you came out here to do the same, when I was younger, and afraid of the dark?”

“Of course I was,” says Maedhros, low and steady. 

“Really?” Elrond raises his eyebrows. “You were doing yourself a favour, were you? Leaving your soft bed to come lie on a cement platform with a squirmy child?” 

“You remember counting my heartbeats, hm? Do you remember they sounded?” his father asks sleepily. “How fast they were, and how swiftly they slowed? That you remember? Of course you don’t. Because you’ve got same thinking capacity as average… what is the animal that becomes a frog? Same brand as worm.” 

“Tadpole.”

“Exactly. Same thinking capacity as a tadpole. You won’t understand how human it felt, coming out here. So you don’t stress your small baby frog brain by doing maths and biology and all. Just shut the fuck up, lie down and sleep. Forget it now.” 

“Human?”

“I’ve spent decades walking around on four legs, boy. I’ve been a dog all my life.” 

It is a joke said through a smile, a half-joke, and yet it bends the spine of the man until he walks in the shape of the word itself. His body twisting through sanctioned apertures, reshaping itself to survive. Still, look how kind and gentle he is, Elrond’s father. How heartwarming it is, to read him like a book. That anything of tenderness, of mirth, of joy still rises from such suffering must be proof of the indomitability of human nature, this miraculous capacity the mistreated seem to have for endurance. How good he makes you feel! That you could spurn such a creature and call him such cruel things, and yet look at him! Look at how kindly he sleeps by his son, how soft-mouthed he is, our very own beaten dog. 

The knowledge that the world can harm a man so and that he will still rise from ashes is what allows apathy to masquerade as kindness. His continued survival becomes a moral loophole. After all, if he breathes, the world must not have broken him entirely. Endurance is forgiveness, rehabilitation is atonement and recovery is consent renewed. 

“Baba, don’t call yourself a dog.”

“I’ll call myself what I want,” Maedhros snaps. Then his face relaxes again, and he winks, offering Elrond a reconciliatory flash of the teeth. “I was only joking. But that’s my classification, boy. Dog. Biology, zoology, same thing. Hey, the law too. Indian Penal Code says so.”

“What?” Elrond frowns, blinking. “What, you mean your terror charge? I don’t think breaking one of the national security acts classifies you as a dog.” 

Maedhros pauses for a moment, as if trying to hold something back. He fails. The smile remains outlined on his cheeks, and his words are ground out through it. “Not the terror charge. You know Section 377? List of all unnatural things,” he raises his arms, checks off points on an enormous imaginary clipboard, his words spilling out too fast and running into each other. “Right there it says, plain and clear. Maedhros Feanorian is a fucking dog.”

Maedhros’ eyes widen. Instantly, he snaps his mouth shut and clenches his jaw, having suddenly realised he has said too much. “Leave it. Lost it for a moment. Forget I said anything.” 

But Elrond cannot take his eyes off his frantic, tense jaw, the feverish tap of his nails on the platform, the quick, false laugh played out again and again. He had never thought of his Baba, the terrorist, through the lens of Section 377—the law prohibiting carnal intercourse against the order of nature. Yes, he knew Maedhros technically counted in its ranks, but there were other laws, battery, sedition, terrorism, laws that could do worse things to him than Section 377 ever could. Had done worse things to him. 

“Was that what he said?” Elrond asks softly. Maedhros is still grinning, still wide-eyed, though his hand is now curled into a fist on his side. “The fellow sticking up those bills. Did he say something about your…” 

“Gay?” Maedhros chuckles, shoving an elbow outwards into Elrond’s rib. “I won’t drop dead if you say the word, boy. I was just fucking with your professor-sir because he… well. Let’s just say I once called him sultanfucker as an insult and he treated it like I gave him a job promotion. That kind of man, I cannot help but fuck with.”  

“That sounds about right, yes. But is that… is that what he said? Not Gil, I mean the bloke you hit today.” 

His father doesn’t respond, but his fist tightens, and it is answer enough. Elrond places a hand on it, and Maedhros doesn’t shake it off. 

“Did you know, Finnu only found out five years ago?” he asks quietly. “How I am. I only told him then.” 

“What… that you’re gay?” 

Maedhros nods, hums in assent. 

Elrond blinks, genuinely confused. “Eh? That can’t be right. Didn’t you get together in your teens? Baba, I swear you threatened Bilbo into pretend-marrying you two for a laugh when we were toddling. What are you saying, Fingon-uncle didn’t know? You’ve lived together for decades!”

“No, I mean he didn’t know about me. He thought I was just like him, see?” his father’s face softens into a familiar fondness, like it always does when Fingon is mentioned. “Like, ah, it doesn’t matter who it is, as long as it’s me. Boy, girl, whatever. As long as it’s Russo. And if it’s not Russo, then it can be anyone else, or no one else. He said he would have probably married a woman, had he never known me.” 

“And is it different for you?” 

Maedhros nods, looking away awkwardly. “Only boys. Always only boys.”

“And Fingon-uncle never knew?” 

“What would I have told him? Just eighteen we were, and my English is… well. I couldn’t say it in Malayalam, so I didn’t. It had never mattered very much to me at the time, and Finnu’s father was very hard on him for the way he was, so that was my priority. I had to get him out of that church, away from that place of silence and shame. My father would have been the same as his I’m sure, would have thrashed me bloody if he knew, but he was dead by then and none of us really went to the mosque, so I never really thought of it in those days. If I knew how to say it, I would have. But it never really mattered to me, I promise you. Then years later, some little cunt in the CPI youth cadre got some sexual charge filed on him, rape offense, and I had to cite the law when filing for his expulsion from the Party.” 

Elrond sighs. “And it comes under the same law as homosexual sex, doesn’t it? Offences against the order of nature?” 

“Yes, that was the first time I read it,” Maedhros’ nails dig into his own palm. “377. The full statute. And yes, same law for rape, incest, I think child abuse too. But that wasn’t what bothered me the most, wasn’t what… no. That, I expected. It was the last two items, put together, right next to each other. Bestiality. Sexual intercourse with animals. Then sodomy. I did not know what it meant, it was an English word, you see—sodomy. I had to look it up in the Malayalam dictionary.”

“That was the part I couldn’t ever forget,” he continues, unconsciously grasping Elrond’s fingers, so tight they turn white at the tips. He laughs again. “Bestiality first. Then, sodomy. Mohammad Razul, you dog, it said. And because Finnu loved someone like me, I had turned him into one too. So for the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. And it was like it had, how do the scientists say it? Confirmed my hypothesis, after the long failed experiment that was my life. Right there in the book. Maedhros Fëanorian is a fucking dog.”

“Oh, Baba.”

“And, well, that’s just what happened today,” Maedhros shrugs, managing another swift smile. “Little shit said something about it. Nothing big. Some nonsense I’ve heard a hundred times before, but something just switched off in me. Turned me into Maedhros Fëanorian, the fucking dog. Well. Bastard won’t be opening his mouth for a while at least. Except for the feeding tube he’ll need.”

Elrond huffs out a laugh, just as false as his father’s casual wink. Yes, he knows there were laws that could do much worse to a man like Maedhros Fëanorian than Section 377 ever could. It was 377 all the same, that did this to him. It was shame, shame always did such things. Crawled into people’s ears and died, rotted away into a stain on the psyche. The Syrian Christian diocese of Kozhikode would hold a solemn procession every Good Friday, transporting an altar of Mary across the city in a slow, barefoot column singing a mournful, never-ending hymn. The vicar would walk in a place of honour out front, holding the altar itself. It was an honour. Sometimes, it would be the vicar’s son. 

His uncle Fingon would stand at the cliff-house gate each year to watch it pass, hard-faced and tearful. Something had happened at one of these processions the same year Elrond and his brother were born, when Maedhros and Fingon were in their late teens, some great and terrible humiliation neither of them had ever spoken to him about. But every year, Fingon would stand at the gate. And Maedhros, normally so cautious about any display of affection in public, who always, always walked an arm’s length away from his partner, would stand at the gate too, pressed tight to Fingon. He’d have his arm around the dance master’s waist, reaching around conspicuously to rest at his navel. As the vicar passed, regardless of which one or when or what party they voted for, Maedhros would step backwards slightly and bring his other arm around Fingon as well, purposefully bending forward and placing his chin on the slim shoulder, nose in his tied-back hair. A whole performance played out in silent, furious gesture, the deliberate re-enactment of a wedding photograph pose, aside from the tears in Fingon’s eyes and the wrath in his father’s. 

He had always understood Fingon’s strained relationship with his family, even though they lived hours away and even though Fingon never really volunteered much information about them. He understood why his uncle left his faith. But Elrond never thought about how there had always been a studied precision in his father’s approach to Maedhros-and-Fingon, a choreography too careful to be bullish confidence or careless apostasy alone. He hadn’t seen how shame had threaded itself into Maedhros across all the years he’d known him, not as epiphany but shoddy architecture: too flimsy to bear its own weight yet too deeply rooted to knock down like scaffolding. Section 377 had never directly condemned Maedhros Feanorian, but he’d been serving his sentence all the same. 

Elrond doesn’t trust himself to speak so he just nods silently, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand. Maedhros’ face is carefully blank. 

“I’m sorry,” says Elrond. “For not seeing it sooner. Not understanding what it was like for you. Not just this. All of it.” 

“I never wanted you to see,” Maedhros mutters as he lays back on the platform and turns away to look out into the yard, casual enough to be a passing remark about being nudged, or the heat. “The hell would I have wanted you to see it, eh? I’m your father. What kind of father would I be, had I ever wanted you to understand such a thing?” 

“Still, Baba. I’m still sorry. I wish I had—I wish I had looked.” 

“I told you not to look, didn’t I? I told you to look away from the dark, to count, hm? And so, you did that. Don’t go beating yourself like this… just for doing as you’re told. You were a child,” Maedhros corrects him sharply. “I’m glad. I’m glad you never saw any of it.”

“No. No, I didn’t see it,” Elrond lay down himself, leaning forward to press his hot, aching forehead against the cool, ridged planes of his father’s scarred back. There is little comfort in the lie, but Elrond takes what he gets, as always. Gives what he can, as usual. “I saw none of it. But there’s no shame in it. The way your life has gone… I don’t think there’s any shame in it.” 

He feels, rather than hears, the low chuckle under Maedhros’ ribs. “You know, a few years after you were sent back, I watched this English movie. Small girl-child, eight or ten years old, pigtails. Stupid hairstyle. And she was some kind of killer. Killed a schoolchild? Something like that.”

“I think I know it… The Bad Seed?” 

“That’s the one. Yes, that’s the one,” the scars on Maedhros’ neck glitter under the clouded moon as he nods. “And in the film, they said she was like that because her grandmother had been a killer also. Same like her, killed her family members I think it was. But the girl’s mother was good. Her mother was good, and kind. But her child. Her child inherited the bad seed. And there was nothing at all she could do about it. It was… inevitable, that child becoming a killer. After you adopted your daughter—I had been… I was very afraid. Because you, I know, are good, and kind. You say things like there’s no shame in it about something most people see as the most shameful thing there is. And it made me doubly afraid. That the… bad seed had skipped a generation. Just like in that film.”

“You’re no killer, Baba. You’re not, and you know it.” 

“I know I’m not a killer. I don’t mean that. You know now what I mean. What I am.” 

Elrond shuts his eyes tight, feels a tear run down his nose. He presses his forehead even harder into Maedhros’ back. “Arwen never wanted to die,” he manages. “Not for a day in her life. She had a thousand plans for her future. She’d tell me she’d be a… fucking hell. Supermodel-activist-writer,” he laughs wetly. “Olympic sprinter as a hobby, and captain of the national women’s netball team on weekends. She was going to write a book, and apparently that book’s only purpose would be to shit on my book. A thousand dreams, Baba. And in my suitcase, I have her List of Places.”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“Everywhere she wanted to go. Though it could double as a bloody atlas, the way it had every damn country in the world. Any time a new country was made independent or declared nationhood, she would march up to her list and write it down. She made me buy her dream graduation dress, from Paris no less, the moment she got into Oxford, three full years before she could ever graduate. Her head was firmly in the future, she even died doing something that will only… with the statue. Even that… even that she was doing for the future, and it was the rest of us who pressured her, by demanding she save the world now.”

“Oh, Baba. Bad seed? Arwen wishing for death? God, no. She was certain she would live forever. When she was fifteen, she drew up this enormous architectural plan for a donkey sanctuary. When Mum came to visit and asked why on earth the spare room was covered in vaguely familiar blueprints, Arwen informed her that they were the plans for the Devonian donkey sanctuary she would build with her inheritance once poor Mum died and left Arwen her bloody mansion. Which, incidentally, was going to be the site of the donkey sanctuary in question.”

“Ha!” Maedhros’ back shakes with a sudden fit of laughter, and it goes on for a while. It’s not often his father laughs like this. “Fuck me. Allah mian. What a wonderful thing that is, boy. All those plans for her future. What a wonderful story to hear. Thank you, Elrond. Such wondrous things you have shown me.”

Maedhros is quick to fall asleep but Elrond finds himself wide awake, staring at the blank ceiling of muffled moonlight and no stars at all. He had spent decades trying to interpret his father’s self-whipping and kneecap-shattering and crafted all the rivers and trees and houses into whose mouths he had put words that felt right at the time. His father, calling someone a goatfucker and breaking their jaw. 

And him, little Elrond, standing off to the side trying to pin a thousand reasons to the gesture, though he knew the right answer had always been right before him. Copying Elros’ wrong answers into his notebook to quell the anxiety crawling up his chest. His father, thrashing a policeman before a crowd, goading him to react. Running down the street with a flaming torch, praying that today would be the day. That today would be the day some kind soul brought a knife to their fistfight. 

And this small cliffside that Maglor pushed him towards, making him go from thinking of the sixteen year old who threw-didn’t-throw a hand-grenade as his Baba, the terrorist, to Mohammad Razul, the suicide bomber, does everything he himself has failed to do for those decades. 

He knows now that Maedhros had never truly sought to make anyone understand him, like he’d wanted to believe all his life. The suicide bomber does not call for understanding—he strips that comfort from you. To him, understanding is a kind of taming: an enclosing gesture that makes the wild contours of a life like his palatable to logic and sentimentality. He does not yield to narrative: there is nothing in his life that can be defined strictly as a childhood sob story and Elrond knows that there will probably never be a true redemption arc, that every historian who attempts to redeem him will fail to do so. He does not try to justify his violence or explain it away with excuses about suffering-in-turn and if-it-hadn’ts. 

A suicide charge, a self-immolation, detonations designed to disrupt the world’s epistemological hunger. A suicide bomber symbolises no fixed caste or creed, defined only by a complete refusal to be represented. A spanner in a narrative machinery that insists lives must be legibly situated, pain systematised, despair domesticated, death rendered pedagogical. 

This is not to praise the violence, not at all, but to insist against its assimilability: to sit with the discomfort that some acts rupture not only flesh but the way in which flesh is read. The right to remain irreducible, erratic and irrational. Unbearability, manifest! The suicide bomb is not a singular act. Interruption after interruption! It is Elrond's ungrievable, volatile, incomprehensible father, an excess spilling out across the porch, his terrified, glittering grin, his frantic, nonsensical “I’ve been a dog all my life, boy.” 

What does he mean? circles like carrion over his head. Why does he do what he does? becomes untenable. Understanding is obscene! Elrond has spent his life chasing theoretical provocations by their tails only to stop short, standing stunned as Maglor tells him that he has known all along. That the problem was never that Elrond misread his father, but that he’d read him all too well. 

How do you love a parent who does not wish to live? What songs can you channel your love through without becoming complicit in the death knell yourself? Does wanting to die mean you have failed at living, or does it mean you never truly lived? 

The suicide bomber answers no such questions. He is no emissary of the better worlds to come. Though he is often followed into the fire, unknowingly, by their outlines. Because when Elros died, Elrond was very, very unhappy. The kind of unhappiness that got people locked up. The kind of unhappiness that swiftly turns into shrouds. Oh, if Maglor only knew. If his Abba only knew, his heart would have shattered. 

Look at me. What have you done to me? said the fire wearing my father’s face. Look! Look at what you have done to me. 

Did Arwen sense it in him too, then? Did she sense it in Elrond like Elrond sensed it in Maedhros? Was that why she had built up a life that would—no, not impress her father, but drag him back from the edge? No. No, not so. It can’t be so. She can’t have done. Oh, she can’t have done. 

He and Celebrían had always thought of Arwen’s Plans for the Future and Lists of Places as the most tragic things about her death. Yes, yes, a radiant life extinguished. The worst part of Arwen’s death: the knowledge that she could have lived forever. But that belief had always carried within it an inheritance Elrond had never really interrogated: the idea that to want to live was a kind of luxury, or worse, a type of delusion. 

And now, breathing alongside his father in the dark, Elrond sees it differently for the first time. The plans, the lists, the scribbled margins in old notebooks and promises to “clear out the attic room if you get me this or that”, not testaments to her death but refusals of it. In a lineage where annihilation feels inevitable, where death is courted over and over again, Arwen’s future-tense feels like a wondrous heresy. 

He thinks about how very soon, the statue of Redvers Buller on Magdalen College would crumple inwards. And then soon after that, it would teeter, then fall. What a wondrous thought it is. How though it seems scarcely possible in histories like these, Arwen, her grandfather’s little revolutionary, would indeed outlive them all.

It’s nearly midnight when Maglor, on his way to lock the front gate, happens upon the two of them. He stands looking at them for a very long time. 

The light turns peculiar when his oil lamp burns down, unprepared for such a prolonged excursion, and Maglor finds himself trying to name it reflexively, this particular night-colour, even though such nights, like the ones in which he rocked a wheezing Elros on his knee as Maedhros kept Elrond company and Celegorm was dispatched to the emergency pharmacy for inhalers, have resisted naming all his life, have always existed in a place far beyond the touch of words. 

The idea of family has long masqueraded as a biological inevitability, but Maglor has always understood it as an artefact: a constructed set of relations which have to be constantly reiterated and performed. The way he’s chased three different sets of twins up the same set of stairs to do their homework. The way he’s ironed Maedhros’ shirts for the five years he didn’t spend in the house, shirts he’d forgotten he’d left behind. Who likes what food, who was allergic to what. 

And these gestures are political too, he knows. In a way, he’s just as much a politician as his brother. The sending-away of the twins. The red carpet rolled out for Elwing of Devon. Every gesture of belonging is an act of imagination. In this house, in this country, in this place and time, family cannot afford to be a neutral act. Maedhros the sword, and Maglor, the shield. There is the cliff-house, and only then is there India. His loyalty belongs to the former, and he would turn outwards on the latter in a blink. 

And yes, it is late when he steps out onto the porch and finds Maedhros and Elrond fast asleep on a single platform. He hears them before he sees them, of course. His brother’s pathological urge to irritate everyone who dared to perceive him did not go dormant at sundown, choosing instead to manifest in the stertorial form with such vim that Fingon’s nightly routine included stuffing pre-cut wads of cotton in his ears. 

Maglor is quite impressed at how the two have not only managed to squeeze onto the same platform together, but also to fall so deeply asleep, as if their proximity to each other negated the uncomfortable quarters. Still, there is a little sting to the image, just as nameless as those old nights. He lets himself be uncharitable for a passing moment, allows himself an awful, fox-like grin at the thought that perhaps this is why he is being so obliging about Elwing’s arrival at the cliff-house, why he’s actively looking forward to her presence.

Perhaps Maglor is just subconsciously groping about for someone to snicker conspiratorially with, to point and laugh unkindly at how his son hangs onto his brother’s every word. To say, look at that, sahiba. Just look how he worships the very ground his kidnapper walks upon. Perhaps he just wants to stand arm-in-arm with someone and say this is unfair to us because it is unfair, to spend hours hissing away like paid-up members of Meenchanda fishmarket’s cat congregation. 

Then as if to atone for his uncharitable thought, Maglor pads inside, gathers a few pillows from the living room couch and brings them out, lining them up on the floor just under where Elrond slept, an arm dangling over the side. This too had been a nightly routine on the evenings Elrond slept on the porch, albeit one he had never been awake to bear witness to. Years and years of placing a line of pillows under his small, sleeping son, just in case Maedhros kicked out unconsciously in his sleep and the boy fell on the hard mosaic floor. The cliff-house that Feanor built, where new ways of living and loving are continuously made and unmade, interrupting the fantasy of nationhood and origin and inheritance. 

A hush falls over the house then, a speculative hush, and Maglor, without knowing what he listens for, listens all the same, for this is his unending quest. Hundreds of differing nights spent almost like this all coagulate into one great, impenetrable mass the colour of granite, thick with insects and birdsong. And under it, a rot undying, as corrosive as an oath sworn long years ago, an old dalliance with doom. 

A great and primordial mountain, a stubbornly buried, hypochondriac giant riddled with fears of impotency, fingers crammed in his ears so nobody can hear him chewing at his own organs. He speaks the language of life and thrives on the machinery of decay. He gnaws away at the cliff-house, Maglor’s house, hollowing it (not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially).  He shudders, and lowers himself down on one of the pillows. The future beckons. He will not let it. 

Maedhros’ lashes rest on his cheek, but his own do not. For Maglor does not take his tired eyes off his brother, cannot look away from the man. For it is only when the world sleeps that the giant can awake. The future, beckoning. The rot, rising and rising. The mountain, eating Mohammad whole.