Lucknow Spaces
Goats in Lucknow
British Residency, Lucknow
girl and find myself crying. No eighteen year old, colonizer or otherwise, deserves death by cannon fire. I wander around the complex, finding couples cuddling in dusty moats and behind chafing columns; India has little private space for such activity. There’s a comfort in this tangle of other people’s history, a distraction from my flickering thoughts. The Residency is close enough to where I live that I return several times, craving the warm clarity of brick against my dense aloneness.
birth, leaving a puddle of placenta on my doorstep. I cradle the goat kid, damp and trembling, her heart a flurry against my palm. There are various conveniences to living in narrow spaces. Just two steps outside my alley is a tiny shop, selling off brand chocolate bars and single sachets of shampoo. I get to know the grandmother who is always there, fingers wound in knitting. Sometimes, I go and sit next to her, knitting a sock of my own. She asks me little questions, the same ones each time. Where do I go each day? What do I eat? How did I get to know my friends who live here? I choose my answers carefully, containing my life in the words that I know and the concepts she can understand.
One morning, I decide to come to work late, walking instead to the botanic gardens. Torrents of middle aged Indians chug around a looped path, their cars clogging the road outside. Most of the more interesting plants are inside locked greenhouses, but I wander around, watching workers spray leaves so they look less grimy. Despite this, it still feels like a sanctuary, and I find a tree to sit beneath, where I read a book and write. I extract stubborn sentences from my fingers, thinking of the person I am going to become when I am not in this place. As I write, I am anywhere, not lost in the unrelenting realities of where I have chosen to come.
Every day, when kids come to see me, they ask when I’m leaving and when I’ll come back. I tell them the time and date of my train, but I don’t have an answer for the second question. I don’t know what I want the answer to be. I am halfway here, and the rest of me is planted elsewhere. So I hold small goats, and watch kites skitter against a grey sky, and greet my neighbours, and try my inadequate best to occupy this very particular space in the world. Every time I answer, I make a choice. “Maybe,” I tell them.
I return from work one day in the middle of November to find that one of the goats—my least favourite one, who never wanted to eat my tea bags — has given 19