Sujata dreamt of jumping off a bridge into the cold black waters of the river that ran close to her downtown home. She did not know how to swim. She had always been advised to stay away from water as a child because her horoscope predicted aqua danger. She never believed in horoscopes but sometimes she wanted to. What would it be like, to park her car on the side of the road, walk slowly towards the bridge, take one look at the swirling waters under her and then climb the barrier. Several times when she drove past that spot during the day she looked at those barriers and thought of what a spine chilling feeling it would be to have an accident and have her car nosedive into the waters. Tonight she dreamt of the scene. She was climbing the barrier and jumping. She actually felt hitting the cold waters and choked out of her sleep.

Sujata woke up and listened to her own breath in the stillness of the night. She listened to the whirring of the fan over her head as a separate and singular sound she could sieve out from all other nightly noises. She heard her upstairs neighbor flush the toilet. She heard sounds of the siren on the highway. She opened her eyes briefly to glance at the digital clock. It said 2.15am. Another night of sleeplessness. Sujata wondered if she would get dark circles under her eyes very soon. After several hours of rhythmically tapping her feet against the bed, she managed to doze off.

Daylight brought forth a flurry of activities and just as every other morning Sujata never had time to realize that she dreamt of death every other night. She had to get the kids ready for school. The younger one, a boy, was 2 years old and had to be dropped off at daycare. The older one was 6. She was a chatter box. She asked too many questions and wanted answers to all of them. Mani took the most time getting ready for school as she had to choose her right clothes, match her hairband with her shirt color and have her socks the right way up and so on. It was almost a war getting her ready for school everyday. She would get cranky very easily and Sujata struggled to keep her voice down this morning. After hurrying Mani through her glass of juice, a toast and a Flintstone vitamin, Sujata ran to the car to drop off the kids at their respective dens.

She had taken the day off from work today to sit at home and contemplate. She looked at herself in the mirror and hated everything she saw. Her eyes had lost the sparkle, the lines around her mouth had gone too deep to be called laugh-lines anymore. Her body wasn’t as tight as it used to be. Her front hair was getting sparse. Sujata was in her early 40s, a widow for the past 5 years, managing 2 kids and a job in a garment agency as a manager and was pregnant.