He came back after years had passed. To the old house in what they once called God's own country. Kerala drowned now and the roads all flooded and the waters lying dark across the land like some great and patient beast. Barbed wire strung across places where paths used to be. No way through. The waters had taken everything. A ruler like Trump. People poor and without money wandering through the drowned world. He did not know how he came to be there or why but he went on anyway. When he reached the house he climbed the stairs to the attic and there in the dust and the half-light he found them. Babies. His brother. His daughter. Still babies. They had not grown. Time had left them there and moved on without them and they remained as they were, small and helpless in the accumulated silence of years. He stood looking at them. The horror of it not in what he saw but in what it meant. That they were alone. That he had left them. That they could not grow or change and that they waited there in the dimness of that upper room and no one came. He felt himself dying. Felt the weight of his own ending like a stone in his chest. Who would care for them when he was gone. Who would even know they were there. The bitterness of it. The terrible arithmetic of time and forgetting. So many thoughts moving through the dream like dark birds and then he woke. The image remained. The babies in the attic. The flooded world. The knowledge that some things once abandoned cannot be recovered and that we are all of us dying and that what we leave behind may simply wait in the darkness until there is no one left to remember that it was ever there at all.