Singillatim

It's the cold. That must be why he doesn't have anything figured out about this place. It creeps into the mind, finding all the cracks in his composure and his attention and trying to freeze and grow and pry all of them open. He can't get warm. Not really. The only way to get moving enough to try to warm up is to go outside. Going out is supposed to be the way out of feeling this way, not the cause of it. Each time he tries to figure out whether or not he's died he just ends up back at the same place, thinking about how damned cold he is again.

He paces back and forth in front of the fireplace at the community hall, too much wanting to move and do and go sparking inside of him to make it worth chaining all that movement inside and slowing down, sitting down, and trying to look sensible. He's frowning, jaw tight, and his elbows are starting to ache from how much time his arms have spent wrapped around his chest, fists and forearms trying to hide as far as possible between his upper arms and sides beneath.

Raju paces, and tells himself he's too close to a fire to still be cold, and tries to make himself think.

If he'd died he would know, surely he would know, but the kind of hit to the head that might have lost him the memory of what time it would have taken to travel from Delhi to some place this freezing would have left injuries behind. If he could only write any of this down, maybe some part of it would become clear.

"Is there paper anywhere here?" he bursts out at the nearest passerby, finally, needing to know something. "A pen, ink, anything that I can use?"

Raju sits up, habit swinging his legs off the side of the little bed before he regrets losing himself the cover of the blankets. It's cold now, colder, because the fire's gone out. It had seemed natural to sleep here tonight, still in the community hall where there'll be more people in the middle of all this bewildering emptiness, and he knew he wouldn't be dreaming deeply enough to worry about sleeping vulnerable surrounded by strangers, anyway. Not staying inside like this, not without being able to go out and spend the day doing enough to earn a night with a quiet mind.

The problem, anyway, here and now: the dark fireplace, and the creeping cold of the pitch-dark night. It isn't a surprise, that there's no electricity to light the place; this is hardly a city, after all. Hardly large enough to be worth the trouble of modernising. What's surprising is that he expects it, that he wakes expecting to stand in his familiar rooms, to walk the familiar paths around his books, to turn the familiar knobs beside the kitchen on the wall. It was never supposed to be familiar, those rooms in Delhi, it was never supposed to be—

All of that hardly matters now. He hadn't been able to sleep deeply enough for his mind to wander far. It's dark, is the actual problem, too dark to see, and no candle, and no lantern, and no way to light them if they were in his hands. The hall is simple, though, and he's spent too much time pacing inside it already and he's certain he knows the place, so if he walks just this direction he should be able—

Habit has Raju's throat tightening and jaw clenching over the sound he'd make otherwise but his body makes a heavy noise when it hits the floor and he rolls out of the way, in case whatever — or whoever — it is he'd walked right into in the dark is about to fall too and come down on top of where he'd been. Or maybe where he is now, depending on which direction whatever it is might fall. There's no way to tell when he can't actually see, but instinctively he tries moving, anyway.

Rolling away makes it even more difficult to tell where in the room he is now, he realises, grimacing and trying to push himself up on an elbow, squinting into the darkness as if that will let him see what he's fallen into. Damn. He'll have to feel in front of him until he finds something familiar. More time out of the blankets in the cold. Which doesn't matter, but he hates it, all the same.