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It was an autumn evening falling over the house in a Kashmiri village that brought the two of them together.

The woman and child were strangers to themselves and to everyone else. Just then, not one of the many people in the household knew how to comfort either of them. Zeenat, for that was her name, had surprised everyone by ringing the doorbell that October evening, having travelled back to her ancestral home by bus. As she stepped off the vehicle at-the end of the street, her head was bowed, she held a suitcase in one hand and a purse was slung over her other shoulder. It was a short walk by the orchards to the big house where her parents and other relatives lived.

She arrived unannounced and refused to answer any questions, merely was going upto the stairs to the room that was once hers, where, now, a little stone-faced child sat in the lap of a female relative. At her approach, the woman dislodged the child from her lap, get up from the carpeted floor, and on her way out to get tea, whispered that the child’s parents were dead - he was deaf-mute and had been living with them for the past few days.

When Zeenat and the child were alone in the room, they avoided each other'’s gaze, locked in their silent personal universes.

Perhaps they understood each other perfectly. She slumped down in a comer with her back against an embroidered cushion. His small body huddled in an oversized pheran, he sat staring at a wall a few feet away from her.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Gunshots rang out on the TV screen opposite; a famous daredevil south-Indian hero was making mincemeat of the villains. It was then that she realized that the room had been noisy all this while; her cousin must have been watching the subtitled movie. The sound did not bother her, barely penetrating the iron cloak of wretchedness that she wore.

The child kept staring at the wall until the woman returned with nun chai and lavas on a tray. Before placing the tray on the floor, she handed the child a piece of the bread, which he accepted with the delayed reactions of a slow automaton. Zeenat too quietly took the tea, cupping her palms around the warm glass tumbler. Her cousin touched her shoulder in a gentle gesture of sympathy, switched the television off and, pulling the curtains across the door, left the two mute strangers in the gaudy room. The colours around them challenged their grey states of mind. There was a small chair in one comer of the room, but no other furniture. The carpet that covered the entire floor was bright red, with a diamond pattern of yellow flowers threaded through it, while the walls were a light shade of blue.

On one side was a glass-fronted display case that held Quranic inscriptions sewed upon an oval, green velvet backdrop, a pair of porcelain dolls, a framed fold-out family picture, and a small copper samovar. The kitsch dolls had once belonged to Zeenat, who had adored the china couple gazing at each other over a patch of colourful flowers.

She looked above the rim of her tumbler and her eyes hooked upon the family picture frame. She could not relate to her own image in that glossy photograph taken on a harvest day in the orchard. Her parents stood on either side of her; everyone looked happy. This was when she had first returned home after her marriage to Fayaz in the autumn of 2013.

Where had Zeenat come to in the bus?

A) She did not know the place

B) Her ancestral home

C) To a strange place that no one recognized

D) To a place in Pakistan