He stumbled into the bar hours after our scheduled time, his eyes beady and laminated with a fresh wetness. His pupils were there, and his irises, yes, he was alive as could be! But his eyes seemed as transparent as windowpanes -- as if he had hollowed himself out for the day, expecting the new world to fill him to the brim, and in the process, wring out his pains and shortcomings. He would be a glamarous caucophony of light and technology. Surely that old darkness of his would collapse to its knees, and he would laugh heartily at his young self -- the ridiculous, fearful boy he had been! I gestured awkwardly, brought him over to the table, where I'd already poured out a rum and coke. Even the tiny space between us glistened with light: it flattened along the table, bounced merrily around our glasses, diverted in the liquid, and popped between the shadows of our rumpled coats. Finally, I allowed myself to take the man in. He was dressed in bright colors; the yellows and oranges contrasted with the deep black wrinkles in his outfit so sharply he looked as if he were composed of fragments. His face, I could not tell you -- he thrashed his head about so violently I saw little other than a blur. At every sound, he would jump and look.

"So what do you think about it?" I asked, humored easily by the author, just as strange as his books. His responses were pithy -- they didn't match such an extravagant look.

"I think its' fit as much changing as it could into a century," he said. He sipped at the rum. His response was a content one. He wasn't, however, a content man. We continued our drinking in silence. I knew he would continue talking, as his skin reddened. And he did.

"Those goddamn moving stars you've got in the air," he started. "I thought we'd begun to harbor some sort of alien civilization! That they were dropping another kind on us, or some secret serum -- began scrutinizing every man woman and child I ran into! Until some good soul told me those were human too, I was right set to believe -- why -- humanity as I'd known it had ceased to exist! That we had become infected..."

He poured himself another drink. I watched him as he melted.

"But it was something worse ... we hadn't been infected...no... we rotted! By our own merit we rotted! It is terrible to have something taken from you. But it is worse when the taking is fair! When it is your fault the thing is gone! And lord, it is our fault, no one else's, that we are gone. I have not felt..." his voice cracked, "I have not felt that human love here still...not once." He hadn't felt it ever, he thought, remembering his father.

His rambling began to bore me. I poured myself another glass, pretended to listen. I thought of my own tragedies as he wept. Before his eyes, I began to grow little legs. My pupils overtook my eyes.

Like this, everyone in the cafe shrank and scuttled. Franze alone remained in his body, dead yet again, the bugs scrambling hungrily over what seemed like a corpse.

My mother's uncle is dying. My father's father is also dying. They die together, three hours apart without traffic. Uncle slipped on a slab of ice on the pink kitchen floor, his ankle perpendicular to its usual position. Now saline solution flattens like a tube of toothpaste into his remaining days. I, nineteen years old, bend in front of him, say my name. He blinks abstractly. Eyes remind me of the kitchen floor, of the sandy walls, of the laundry dripping on hauling strings into this salty soil of Ahmedabad. He says I look just like my mother. My grandfather is also dying. One eye looks at my feet and the other to my neck. I remember he is the father of the father I had many years ago, and he is dying too, in another country. He has not seen his son in years. In these owl-eyes I cannot place I see my uncle dying in the last sunset, in the golden-orange good night. I see his hand against the tan and brown checkered boards, his fingers swollen against marbles, the red grip on a cricket bat. He says I look just like my father. I say we see what we need to see when we are dying, and this is my proof. This is God dusting off the edges before he sends Death in, this is all going according to plan. I look in the mirror, knowing this. Dying lurches in me as if it is my time, as if I am stone against the skins of a river. I think vaguely of being alive, being born. But my mother's cheeks are pinned against my father's eyes, my mother's eyebrows guard her nose, my father's forehead overtakes my mother's silken hair. I realize I am made up of dead and dying. I take a pair of scissors from the kitchen counter. I cut apart my body's sides, set them on the gleaming floor, and watch them fight, popcorn in the microwave.

My grandfather lay still on the couch, his eyebrows arched, his glasses just at the tip of his nose. He is peering down at something, maybe the corner of the morning paper, maybe me. Fifty years ago he worked as an engineer, his ears against the blaring mechanisms of soviet planes; he is nearly deaf now. The milkman will come soon. I should wake him from his trance, this otherworldly placitude. I tell him it is quiet today, quiet outside. This stirs him. All of India will hear him now, I think, as he rises from his slouch, and turns to face me -- his voice was never low or measured, never needed to be. He tells me quiet is relative. I do not know the silence of a ceasefire, a handshake precariously balanced atop a mound of bloodied soldiers, I do not know the dull ring of a war ending. The turbines that spin about as if they are grinding bones, their crushing spirals, the screech of an aluminum sky. I do not know quiet until I have heard loud. I do not know how the people awoke, devastatingly, from their empty rivalry. There was air, and silence. There were souring bodies.